GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

APPLES OR INDIANS • 155
who note that Aboriginal Australians entered the modern world as Stone
Age hunter-gatherers often assume that the Aborigines would have gone
on that way forever.
To appreciate the fallacy, consider a visitor from Outer Space who
dropped in on Earth in the year 3000 B.C. The spaceling would have
observed no food production in the eastern United States, because food
production did not begin there until around 2500 B.c. Had the visitor of
3000 B.C. drawn the conclusion that limitations posed by the wild plants
and animals of the eastern United States foreclosed food production there
forever, events of the subsequent millennium would have proved the visitor
wrong. Even a visitor to the Fertile Crescent in 9500 B.C. rather than
in 8500 B.C. could have been misled into supposing the Fertile Crescent
permanently unsuitable for food production.
That is, my thesis is not that California, Australia, western Europe, and
all the other areas without indigenous food production were devoid of
domesticable species and would have continued to be occupied just by
hunter-gatherers indefinitely if foreign domesticates or peoples had not
arrived. Instead, I note that regions differed greatly in their available pool
of domesticable species, that they varied correspondingly in the date when
local food production arose, and that food production had not yet arisen
independently in some fertile regions as of modern times.
Australia, supposedly the most "backward" continent, illustrates this
point well. In southeastern Australia, the well-watered part of the continent
most suitable for food production, Aboriginal societies in recent millennia
appear to have been evolving on a trajectory that would eventually
have led to indigenous food production. They had already built winter
villages. They had begun to manage their environment intensively for fish
production by building fish traps, nets, and even long canals. Had Europeans
not colonized Australia in 1788 and aborted that independent trajectory,
Aboriginal Australians might within a few thousand years have
become food producers, tending ponds of domesticated fish and growing
domesticated Australian yams and small-seeded grasses.
In that light, we can now answer the question implicit in the title of this
chapter. I asked whether the reason for the failure of North American
Indians to domesticate North American apples lay with the Indians or with
the apples.
I'm not thereby implying that apples could never have been domesticated
in North America. Recall that apples were historically among the