GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

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tages of Fertile Crescent peoples themselves. Indeed, I am unaware of anyone's
even seriously suggesting any supposed distinctive biological features
of the region's peoples that might have contributed to the potency of its
food production package. Instead, we have seen that the many distinctive
features of the Fertile Crescent's climate, environment, wild plants, and
animals together provide a convincing explanation.
Since the food production packages arising indigenously in New Guinea
and in the eastern United States were considerably less potent, might the
explanation there lie with the peoples of those areas? Before turning to
those regions, however, we must consider two related questions arising in
regard to any area of the world where food production never developed
independently or else resulted in a less potent package. First, do huntergatherers
and incipient farmers really know well all locally available wild
species and their uses, or might they have overlooked potential ancestors
of valuable crops? Second, if they do know their local plants and animals,
do they exploit that knowledge to domesticate the most useful available
species, or do cultural factors keep them from doing so?
As regards the first question, an entire field of science, termed ethnobiol¬
ogy, studies peoples' knowledge of the wild plants and animals in their
environment. Such studies have concentrated especially on the world's few
surviving hunting-gathering peoples, and on farming peoples who still
depend heavily on wild foods and natural products. The studies generally
show that such peoples are walking encyclopedias of natural history, with
individual names (in their local language) for as many as a thousand or
more plant and animal species, and with detailed knowledge of those species'
biological characteristics, distribution, and potential uses. As people
become increasingly dependent on domesticated plants and animals, this
traditional knowledge gradually loses its value and becomes lost, until one
arrives at modern supermarket shoppers who could not distinguish a wild
grass from a wild pulse.
Here's a typical example. For the last 33 years, while conducting biological
exploration in New Guinea, I have been spending my field time there
constantly in the company of New Guineans who still use wild plants and
animals extensively. One day, when my companions of the Fore tribe and
I were starving in the jungle because another tribe was blocking our return
to our supply base, a Fore man returned to camp with a large rucksack
full of mushrooms he had found, and started to roast them. Dinner at
last! But then I had an unsettling thought: what if the mushrooms were
poisonous?