GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

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lowlanders obtain protein from the fish they catch, New Guinea highland
farmer populations suffer from severe protein limitation, because the staple
crops that provide most of their calories (taro and sweet potato) are
low in protein. Taro, for example, consists of barely 1 percent protein,
much worse than even white rice, and far below the levels of the Fertile
Crescent's wheats and pulses (8-14 percent and 20-25 percent protein,
respectively).
Children in the New Guinea highlands have the swollen bellies characteristic
of a high-bulk but protein-deficient diet. New Guineans old and
young routinely eat mice, spiders, frogs, and other small animals that peoples
elsewhere with access to large domestic mammals or large wild game
species do not bother to eat. Protein starvation is probably also the ultimate
reason why cannibalism was widespread in traditional New Guinea
highland societies.
Finally, in former times New Guinea's available root crops were limiting
for calories as well as for protein, because they do not grow well at the
high elevations where many New Guineans live today. Many centuries
ago, however, a new root crop of ultimately South American origin, the
sweet potato, reached New Guinea, probably by way of the Philippines,
where it had been introduced by Spaniards. Compared with taro and other
presumably older New Guinea root crops, the sweet potato can be grown
up to higher elevations, grows more quickly, and gives higher yields per
acre cultivated and per hour of labor. The result of the sweet potato's
arrival was a highland population explosion. That is, even though people
had been farming in the New Guinea highlands for many thousands of
years before sweet potatoes were introduced, the available local crops had
limited them in the population densities they could attain, and in the elevations
they could occupy.
In short, New Guinea offers an instructive contrast to the Fertile Crescent.
Like hunter-gatherers of the Fertile Crescent, those of New Guinea
did evolve food production independently. However, their indigenous food
production was restricted by the local absence of domesticable cereals,
pulses, and animals, by the resulting protein deficiency in the highlands,
and by limitations of the locally available root crops at high elevations.
Yet New Guineans themselves know as much about the wild plants and
animals available to them as any peoples on Earth today. They can be
expected to have discovered and tested any wild plant species worth
domesticating. They are perfectly capable of recognizing useful additions