GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

152. • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
hickory). Local Native Americans did develop an agriculture based on
local domesticates, did thereby support themselves in villages, and even
developed a cultural florescence (the Hopewell culture centered on what is
today Ohio) around 200 B.C.-A.D. 400. They were thus in a position for
several thousand years to exploit as potential crops the most useful available
wild plants, whatever those should be.
Nevertheless, the Hopewell florescence sprang up nearly 9,000 years
after the rise of village living in the Fertile Crescent. Still, it was not until
after A.D. 900 that the assembly of the Mexican crop trinity triggered a
larger population boom, the so-called Mississippian florescence, which
produced the largest towns and most complex societies achieved by Native
Americans north of Mexico. But that boom came much too late to prepare
Native Americans of the United States for the impending disaster of European
colonization. Food production based on eastern U.S. crops alone had
been insufficient to trigger the boom, for reasons that are easy to specify.
The area's available wild cereals were not nearly as useful as wheat and
barley. Native Americans of the eastern United States domesticated no
locally available wild pulse, no fiber crop, no fruit or nut tree. They had
no domesticated animals at all except for dogs, which were probably
domesticated elsewhere in the Americas.
It's also clear that Native Americans of the eastern United States were
not overlooking potential major crops among the wild species around
them. Even 20th-century plant breeders, armed with all the power of modern
science, have had little success in exploiting North American wild
plants. Yes, we have now domesticated pecans as a nut tree and blueberries
as a fruit, and we have improved some Eurasian fruit crops (apples, plums,
grapes, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries) by hybridizing them with
North American wild relatives. However, those few successes have
changed our food habits far less than Mexican corn changed food habits
of Native Americans in the eastern United States after A.D. 900.
The farmers most knowledgeable about eastern U.S. domesticates, the
region's Native Americans themselves, passed judgment on them by discarding
or deemphasizing them when the Mexican trinity arrived. That
outcome also demonstrates that Native Americans were not constrained
by cultural conservativism and were quite able to appreciate a good plant
when they saw it. Thus, as in New Guinea, the limitations on indigenous
food production in the eastern United States were not due to Native Amer-