GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

154 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
species suitable for domestication. In fact, most areas where indigenous
food production arose late or not at all offered exceptionally poor rather
than rich resources to hunter-gatherers, because most large mammals of
Australia and the Americas (but not of Eurasia and Africa) had become
extinct toward the end of the Ice Ages. Food production would have faced
even less competition from hunting-gathering in these areas than it did
in the Fertile Crescent. Hence these local failures or limitations of food
production cannot be attributed to competition from bountiful hunting
opportunities.
LEST THESE CONCLUSIONS be misinterpreted, we should end this
chapter with caveats against exaggerating two points: peoples' readiness
to accept better crops and livestock, and the constraints imposed by locally
available wild plants and animals. Neither that readiness nor those constraints
are absolute.
We've already discussed many examples of local peoples' adopting
more-productive crops domesticated elsewhere. Our broad conclusion is
that people can recognize useful plants, would therefore have probably
recognized better local ones suitable for domestication if any had existed,
and aren't barred from doing so by cultural conservatism or taboos. But a
big qualifier must be added to this sentence: "in the long run and over
large areas." Anyone knowledgeable about human societies can cite innumerable
examples of societies that refused crops, livestock, and other innovations
that would have been productive.
Naturally, I don't subscribe to the obvious fallacy that every society
promptly adopts every innovation that would be useful for it. The fact is
that, over entire continents and other large areas containing hundreds of
competing societies, some societies will be more open to innovation, and
some will be more resistant. The ones that do adopt new crops, livestock,
or technology may thereby be enabled to nourish themselves better and to
outbreed, displace, conquer, or kill off societies resisting innovation.
That's an important phenomenon whose manifestations extend far beyondthe
adoption of new crops, and to which we shall return in Chapter 13.
Our other caveat concerns the limits that locally available wild species
set on the rise of food production. I'm not saying that food production
could never, in any amount of time, have arisen in all those areas where it
actually had not arisen indigenously by modern times. Europeans today