GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

3 6 4 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
puted claims of older human occupation sites in the Americas prove valid,
those postulated pre-Clovis inhabitants remained for unknown reasons
very sparsely distributed and did not launch a Pleistocene proliferation of
hunter-gatherer societies with expanding populations, technology, and art
as in the Old World. Food production was already arising in the Fertile
Crescent only 1,500 years after the time when Clovis-derived hunter-gatherers
were just reaching southern South America.
Several possible consequences of that Eurasian head start deserve consideration.
First, could it have taken a long time after 11,000 B.C. for the
Americas to fill up with people? When one works out the likely numbers
involved, one finds that this effect would make only a trivial contribution
to the Americas' 5,000-year lag in food-producing villages. The calculations
given in Chapter 1 tell us that even if a mere 100 pioneering Native
Americans had crossed the Canadian border into the lower United States
and increased at a rate of only 1 percent per year, they would have saturated
the Americas with hunter-gatherers within 1,000 years. Spreading
south at a mere one mile per month, those pioneers would have reached
the southern tip of South America only 700 years after crossing the Canadian
border. Those postulated rates of spread and of population increase
are very low compared with actual known rates for peoples occupying
previously uninhabited or sparsely inhabited lands. Hence the Americas
were probably fully occupied by hunter-gatherers within a few centuries
of the arrival of the first colonists.
Second, could a large part of the 5,000-year lag have represented the
time that the first Americans required to become familiar with the new
local plant species, animal species, and rock sources that they encountered?
If we can again reason by analogy with New Guinean and Polynesian
hunter-gatherers and farmers occupying previously unfamiliar
environments—such as Maori colonists of New Zealand or Tudawhe colonists
of New Guinea's Karimui Basin—the colonists probably discovered
the best rock sources and learned to distinguish useful from poisonous
wild plants and animals in much less than a century.
Third, what about Eurasians' head start in developing locally appropriate
technology? The early farmers of the Fertile Crescent and China
were heirs to the technology that behaviorially modern Homo sapiens had
been developing to exploit local resources in those areas for tens of thousands
of years. For instance, the stone sickles, underground storage pits,
and other technology that hunter-gatherers of the Fertile Crescent had