Who cares about gold???

An interesting question that mann brings up is, why is gold so sought after and expensive. I have actually wondered this myself because gold has no practical purpose. Its very heavy and very easily bent or shaped, this renders it useless for construction or weaponry. The only real purposes it has are decoration and currency. so why do people want it so much? The one unique feature it has is its malubility, if done the right way you can have a sheet of gold one atom thick. This still doesn't serve any real practical purpose other that decoration.

A major reason we think that America was sparsly populated before colombus is because In some cases ninety per cent of Native american tribe populations were decimated by small pox. Those that were left were just a skeleton of what had once been a thriving culture. This is a perfect example of Jared diamonds Guns germs and steel theory. The Native americans had never encounterd small pox so they had no defense against it in their immune systems.

Manns writing is sometimes very hard to decipher sometimes. the point i was talking about in the paragraph above was written very factually and i had to read it atleast twice before I completely understood it. I like reading this book but it is very filling reading I think it will take me a very long time to finish.