GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

SPACIOUS SKIES AND TILTED AXES • 191
or from Egypt to South Africa, while amber waves of wheat and barley
came to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the spacious skies of
Eurasia. That faster spread of Eurasian agriculture, compared with that of
Native American and sub-Saharan African agriculture, played a role (as
the next part of this book will show) in the more rapid diffusion of Eurasian
writing, metallurgy, technology, and empires.
To bring up all those differences isn't to claim that widely distributed
crops are admirable, or that they testify to the superior ingenuity of early
Eurasian farmers. They reflect, instead, the orientation of Eurasia's axis
compared with that of the Americas or Africa. Around those axes turned
the fortunes of history.