GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

156 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
most difficult fruit trees to cultivate and among the last major ones to be
domesticated in Eurasia, because their propagation requires the difficult
technique of grafting. There is no evidence for large-scale cultivation of
apples even in the Fertile Crescent and in Europe until classical Greek
times, 8,000 years after the rise of Eurasian food production began. If
Native Americans had proceeded at the same rate in inventing or acquiring
grafting techniques, they too would eventually have domesticated apples—
around the year A.D. 5500, some 8,000 years after the rise of domestication
in North America around 2500 B.C.
Thus, the reason for the failure of Native Americans to domesticate
North American apples by the time Europeans arrived lay neither with the
people nor with the apples. As far as biological prerequisites for apple
domestication were concerned, North American Indian farmers were like
Eurasian farmers, and North American wild apples were like Eurasian
wild apples. Indeed, some of the supermarket apple varieties now being
munched by readers of this chapter have been developed recently by crossing
Eurasian apples with wild North American apples. Instead, the reason
Native Americans did not domesticate apples lay with the entire suite of
wild plant and animal species available to Native Americans. That suite's
modest potential for domestication was responsible for the late start of
food production in North America.