GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

94 ' GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
surprised too at several other modern breadbaskets that were still then
without it—including all the rest of the United States, England and much
of France, Indonesia, and all of subequatorial Africa. When we trace food
production back to its beginnings, the earliest sites provide another surprise.
Far from being modern breadbaskets, they include areas ranking
today as somewhat dry or ecologically degraded: Iraq and Iran, Mexico,
the Andes, parts of China, and Africa's Sahel zone. Why did food production
develop first in these seemingly rather marginal lands, and only later
in today's most fertile farmlands and pastures?
Geographic differences in the means by which food production arose
are also puzzling. In a few places it developed independently, as a result of
local people domesticating local plants and animals. In most other places
it was instead imported, in the form of crops and livestock that had been
domesticated elsewhere. Since those areas of nonindependent origins were
suitable for prehistoric food production as soon as domesticates had
arrived, why did the peoples of those areas not become farmers and herders
without outside assistance, by domesticating local plants and animals?
Among those regions where food production did spring up independently,
why did the times at which it appeared vary so greatly—for example,
thousands of years earlier in eastern Asia than in the eastern United
States and never in eastern Australia? Among those regions into which it
was imported in the prehistoric era, why did the date of arrival also vary
so greatly—for example, thousands of years earlier in southwestern
Europe than in the southwestern United States? Again among those
regions where it was imported, why in some areas (such as the southwestern
United States) did local hunter-gatherers themselves adopt crops and
livestock from neighbors and survive as farmers, while in other areas (such
as Indonesia and much of subequatorial Africa) the importation of food
production involved a cataclysmic replacement of the region's original
hunter-gatherers by invading food producers? All these questions involve
developments that determined which peoples became history's have-nots,
and which became its haves.
BEFORE WE CAN hope to answer these questions, we need to figure out
how to identify areas where food production originated, when it arose
there, and where and when a given crop or animal was first domesticated.
The most unequivocal evidence comes from identification of plant and