GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

HISTORY'S HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS • 97
actually uncalibrated. The dates that I report in this book for events within
the last 15,000 years are calibrated dates. That accounts for some of the
discrepancies that readers may note between this book's dates and those
quoted in some standard reference books on early food production.
Once one has recognized and dated ancient remains of domestic plants
or animals, how does one decide whether the plant or animal was actually
domesticated in the vicinity of that site itself, rather than domesticated
elsewhere and then spread to the site? One method is to examine a map of
the geographic distribution of the crop's or animal's wild ancestor, and to
reason that domestication must have taken place in the area where the
wild ancestor occurs. For example, chickpeas are widely grown by traditional
farmers from the Mediterranean and Ethiopia east to India, with
the latter country accounting for 80 percent of the world's chickpea production
today. One might therefore have been deceived into supposing that
chickpeas were domesticated in India. But it turns out that ancestral wild
chickpeas occur only in southeastern Turkey. The interpretation that
chickpeas were actually domesticated there is supported by the fact that
the oldest finds of possibly domesticated chickpeas in Neolithic archaeological
sites come from southeastern Turkey and nearby northern Syria
that date to around 8000 B.C.; not until over 5,000 years later does archaeological
evidence of chickpeas appear on the Indian subcontinent.
A second method for identifying a crop's or animal's site of domestication
is to plot on a map the dates of the domesticated form's first appearance
at each locality. The site where it appeared earliest may be its site of
initial domestication—especially if the wild ancestor also occurred there,
and if the dates of first appearance at other sites become progressively
earlier with increasing distance from the putative site of initial domestication,
suggesting spread to those other sites. For instance, the earliest
known cultivated emmer wheat comes from the Fertile Crescent around
•8500 B.C. Soon thereafter, the crop appears progressively farther west,
reaching Greece around 6500 B.C. and Germany around 5000 B.C. Those
dates suggest domestication of emmer wheat in the Fertile Crescent, a conclusion
supported by the fact that ancestral wild emmer wheat is confined
to the area extending from Israel to western Iran and Turkey.
However, as we shall see, complications arise in many cases where the
Same plant or animal was domesticated independently at several different
Sites. Such cases can often be detected by analyzing the resulting morphological,
genetic, or chromosomal differences between specimens of the