GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

HEMISPHERES COLLIDING • 3 6 5
been evolving to utilize wild cereals were available to the first cereal farmers
of the Fertile Crescent. In contrast, the first settlers of the Americas
arrived in Alaska with equipment appropriate to the Siberian Arctic tundra.
They had to invent for themselves the equipment suitable to each
new habitat they encountered. That technology lag may have contributed
significantly to the delay in Native American developments.
An even more obvious factor behind the delay was the wild animals and
plants available for domestication. As I discussed in Chapter 6, when
hunter-gatherers adopt food production, it is not because they foresee the
potential benefits awaiting their remote descendants but because incipient
food production begins to offer advantages over the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Early food production was less competitive with hunting-gathering
in the Americas than in the Fertile Crescent or China, partly owing to
the Americas' virtual lack of domesticable wild mammals. Hence early
American farmers remained dependent on wild animals for animal protein
and necessarily remained part-time hunter-gatherers, whereas in both the
Fertile Crescent and China animal domestication followed plant domestication
very closely in time to create a food producing package that quickly
won out over hunting-gathering. In addition, Eurasian domestic animals
made Eurasian agriculture itself more competitive by providing fertilizer,
and eventually by drawing plows.
Features of American wild plants also contributed to the lesser competitiveness
of Native American food production. That conclusion is clearest
for the eastern United States, where less than a dozen crops were domesticated,
including small-seeded grains but no large-seeded grains, pulses,
fiber crops, or cultivated fruit or nut trees. It is also clear for Mesoameri¬
ca's staple grain of corn, which spread to become a dominant crop elsewhere
in the Americas as well. Whereas the Fertile Crescent's wild wheat
and barley evolved into crops with minimal changes and within a few centuries,
wild teosinte may have required several thousand years to evolve
into corn, having to undergo drastic changes in its reproductive biology
and energy allocation to seed production, loss of the seed's rock-hard casings,
and an enormous increase in cob size.
As a result, even if one accepts the recently postulated later dates for
the onset of Native American plant domestication, about 1,500 or 2,000
years would have elapsed between that onset (about 3000-2500 B.C.) and
widespread year-round villages (1800-500 B.C.) in Mesoamerica, the
inland Andes, and the eastern United States. Native American farming