GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

1 4 4 ' GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
I patiently explained to my Fore companions that I had read about some
mushrooms' being poisonous, that I had heard of even expert American
mushroom collectors' dying because of the difficulty of distinguishing safe
from dangerous mushrooms, and that although we were all hungry, it just
wasn't worth the risk. At that point my companions got angry and told
me to shut up and listen while they explained some things to me. After I
had been quizzing them for years about names of hundreds of trees and
birds, how could I insult them by assuming they didn't have names for
different mushrooms? Only Americans could be so stupid as to confuse
poisonous mushrooms with safe ones. They went on to lecture me about
29 types of edible mushroom species, each species' name in the Fore language,
and where in the forest one should look for it. This one, the tanti,
grew on trees, and it was delicious and perfectly edible.
Whenever I have taken New Guineans with me to other parts of their
island, they regularly talk about local plants and animals with other New
Guineans whom they meet, and they gather potentially useful plants and
bring them back to their home villages to try planting them. My experiences
with New Guineans are paralleled by those of ethnobiologists studying
traditional peoples elsewhere. However, all such peoples either
practice at least some food production or are the partly acculturated last
remnants of the world's former hunter-gatherer societies. Knowledge of
wild species was presumably even more detailed before the rise of food
production, when everyone on Earth still depended entirely on wild species
for food. The first farmers were heirs to that knowledge, accumulated
through tens of thousands of years of nature observation by biologically
modern humans living in intimate dependence on the natural world. It
therefore seems extremely unlikely that wild species of potential value
would have escaped the notice of the first farmers.
The other, related question is whether ancient hunter-gatherers and
farmers similarly put their ethnobiological knowledge to good use in
selecting wild plants to gather and eventually to cultivate. One test comes
from an archaeological site at the edge of the Euphrates Valley in Syria,
called Tell Abu Hureyra. Between 10,000 and 9000 B.C. the people living
there may already have been residing year-round in villages, but they were
still hunter-gatherers; crop cultivation began only in the succeeding millennium.
The archaeologists Gordon Hillman, Susan Colledge, and David
Harris retrieved large quantities of charred plant remains from the site,
probably representing discarded garbage of wild plants gathered elsewhere