GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

CHAPTER 5
HISTORY'S HAVES AND
HAVE-NOTS
MUCH OF HUMAN HISTORY HAS CONSISTED OF UNEQUAL
conflicts between the haves and the have-nots: between peoples
with farmer power and those without it, or between those who acquired
it at different times. It should come as no surprise that food production
never arose in large areas of the globe, for ecological reasons that still
make it difficult or impossible there today. For instance, neither farming
nor herding developed in prehistoric times in North America's Arctic,
while the sole element of food production to arise in Eurasia's Arctic was
reindeer herding. Nor could food production spring up spontaneously in
deserts remote from sources of water for irrigation, such as central Australia
and parts of the western United States.
Instead, what cries out for explanation is the failure of food production
to appear, until modern times, in some ecologically very suitable areas that
are among the world's richest centers of agriculture and herding today.
Foremost among these puzzling areas, where indigenous peoples were still
hunter-gatherers when European colonists arrived, were California and
the other Pacific states of the United States, the Argentine pampas, southwestern
and southeastern Australia, and much of the Cape region of South
Africa. Had we surveyed the world in 4000 B.c., thousands of years after
the rise of food production in its oldest sites of origin, we would have been