GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

1 3 4 ' GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
Africa, southern Asia, and eastern Australia, some of them closely related
to Olea europea, but none of them was ever domesticated. Similarly, while
a wild apple species and a wild grape species were domesticated in Eurasia,
there are many related wild apple and grape species in North America,
some of which have in modern times been hybridized with the crops
derived from their wild Eurasian counterparts in order to improve those
crops. Why, then, didn't Native Americans domesticate those apparently
useful apples and grapes themselves?
One can go on and on with such examples. But there is a fatal flaw in
this reasoning: plant domestication is not a matter of hunter-gatherers'
domesticating a single plant and otherwise carrying on unchanged with
their nomadic lifestyle. Suppose that North American wild apples really
would have evolved into a terrific crop if only Indian hunter-gatherers had
settled down and cultivated them. But nomadic hunter-gatherers would
not throw over their traditional way of life, settle in villages, and start
tending apple orchards unless many other domesticable wild plants and
animals were available to make a sedentary food-producing existence
competitive with a hunting-gathering existence.
How, in short, do we assess the potential of an entire local flora for
domestication? For those Native Americans who failed to domesticate
North American apples, did the problem really lie with the Indians or with
the apples?
In order to answer this question, we shall now compare three regions
that lie at opposite extremes among centers of independent domestication.
As we have seen, one of them, the Fertile Crescent, was perhaps the earliest
center of food production in the world, and the site of origin of several of
the modern world's major crops and almost all of its major domesticated
animals. The other two regions, New Guinea and the eastern United
States, did domesticate local crops, but these crops were very few in variety,
only one of them gained worldwide importance, and the resulting food
package failed to support extensive development of human technology and
political organization as in the Fertile Crescent. In the light of this comparison,
we shall ask: Did the flora and environment of the Fertile Crescent
have clear advantages over those of New Guinea and the eastern United
States?
ONE OF THE central facts of human history is the early importance of
the part of Southwest Asia known as the Fertile Crescent (because of the