GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

HEMISPHERES COLLIDING • 3 5 5
and Eurasian food production involved big domestic mammal species. In
Chapter 9 we encountered Eurasia's 13 species, which became its chief
source of animal protein (meat and milk), wool, and hides, its main mode
of land transport of people and goods, its indispensable vehicles of warfare,
and (by drawing plows and providing manure) a big enhancer of crop
production. Until waterwheels and windmills began to replace Eurasia's
mammals in medieval times, they were also the major source of its "industrial"
power beyond human muscle power—for example, for turning
grindstones and operating water lifts. In contrast, the Americas had only
one species of big domestic mammal, the llama / alpaca, confined to a
small area of the Andes and the adjacent Peruvian coast. While it was used
for meat, wool, hides, and goods transport, it never yielded milk for
human consumption, never bore a rider, never pulled a cart or a plow, and
never served as a power source or vehicle of warfare.
That's an enormous set of differences between Eurasian and Native
American societies—due largely to the Late Pleistocene extinction (extermination?)
of most of North and South America's former big wild mammal
species. If it had not been for those extinctions, modern history might
have taken a different course. When Cortes and his bedraggled adventurers
landed on the Mexican coast in 1519, they might have been driven into
the sea by thousands of Aztec cavalry mounted on domesticated native
American horses. Instead of the Aztecs' dying of smallpox, the Spaniards
might have been wiped out by American germs transmitted by diseaseresistant
Aztecs. American civilizations resting on animal power might
have been sending their own conquistadores to ravage Europe. But those
hypothetical outcomes were foreclosed by mammal extinctions thousands
of years earlier.
Those extinctions left Eurasia with many more wild candidates for
domestication than the Americas offered. Most candidates disqualify
themselves as potential domesticates for any of half a dozen reasons.
Hence Eurasia ended up with its 13 species of big domestic mammals and
the Americas with just its one very local species. Both hemispheres also
had domesticated species of birds and small mammals—the turkey, guinea
pig, and Muscovy duck very locally and the dog more widely in the Americas;
chickens, geese, ducks, cats, dogs, rabbits, honeybees, silkworms, and
some others in Eurasia. But the significance of all those species of small
domestic animals was trivial compared with that of the big ones.
Eurasia and the Americas also differed with respect to plant food pro-