GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

330 ' GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
ducks, and geese were others. Familiar later Chinese crops include soybeans,
hemp, citrus fruit, tea, apricots, peaches, and pears. In addition,
just as Eurasia's east-west axis permitted many of these Chinese animals
and crops to spread westward in ancient times, West Asian domesticates
also spread eastward to China and became important there. Especially significant
western contributions to ancient China's economy have been
wheat and barley, cows and horses, and (to a lesser extent) sheep and
goats.
As elsewhere in the world, in China food production gradually led to
the other hallmarks of "civilization" discussed in Chapters 11-14. A
superb Chinese tradition of bronze metallurgy had its origins in the third
millennium B.c. and eventually resulted in China's developing by far the
earliest cast-iron production in the world, around 500 B.C. The following
1,500 years saw the outpouring of Chinese technological inventions, mentioned
in Chapter 13, that included paper, the compass, the wheelbarrow,
and gunpowder. Fortified towns emerged in the third millennium B.C.,
with cemeteries whose great variation between unadorned and luxuriously
furnished graves bespeaks emerging class differences. Stratified societies
whose rulers could mobilize large labor forces of commoners are also
attested by huge urban defensive walls, big palaces, and eventually the
Grand Canal (the world's longest canal, over 1,000 miles long), linking
North and South China. Writing is preserved from the second millennium
B.C. but probably arose earlier. Our archaeological knowledge of China's
emerging cities and states then becomes supplemented by written accounts
of China's first dynasties, going back to the Xia Dynasty, which arose
around 2000 B.C.
As for food production's more sinister by-product of infectious diseases,
we cannot specify where within the Old World most major diseases of
Old World origin arose. However, European writings from Roman and
medieval times clearly describe the arrival of bubonic plague and possibly
smallpox from the east, so these germs could be of Chinese or East Asian
origin. Influenza (derived from pigs) is even more likely to have arisen in
China, since pigs were domesticated so early and became so important
there.
China's size and ecological diversity spawned many separate local cultures,
distinguishable archaeologically by their differing styles of pottery
and artifacts. In the fourth millennium B.C. those local cultures expanded
geographically and began to interact, compete with each other, and