Guns, Germs, and Steel: Part II: Chapters 8-10

The world holds only about 148 species of large wild mammalian terrestrial herbivores or omnivores, the large mammals that could be considered candidates for domestication.

The world holds only about 148 species of large wild mammalian terrestrial herbivores or omnivores, the large mammals that could be considered candidates for domestication.

Yet some of the world’s failures to domesticate wild plants remain hard to explain. The most flagrant cases concern plants that were domesticated in one area but not in another.

But nomadic hunter-gatherers would not throw over their traditional way of life, settle in villages, and start tending apple orchards unless many other domesticable wild plants and animals were available to make a sedentary food-producing existence competitive with a hunting-gathering existence.

Southwest Asia has few large rivers and only a short coastline, providing relatively meager aquatic resources (in the form of river and coastal fish and shellfish).

Were those naive villagers collecting every type of seed plant that they found, bringing it home, poisoning themselves on most of the species, and nourishing themselves from only a few species?

While 157 species sounds like indiscriminate collecting, many more species growing wild in the vicinity were absent from the charred remains.

Leaving aside species with small or unpalatable seeds, they picked out 23 of the most palatable and largest-seeded wild grasses.

As for the other 21 species, their drawbacks include smaller seeds, in many cases lower abundance, and in some cases their being perennial rather than annual plants, with the consequence that they would have evolved only slowly under domestication.

Thus, New Guineans have had ample opportunity to get to know their local flora and fauna.

Thus, New Guineans have had ample opportunity to get to know their local flora and fauna.

In particular, modern New Guinea hunters suffer from the crippling disadvantage of a dearth of wild game: there is no native land animal larger than a 100-pound flightless bird (the cassowary) and a 50-pound kangaroo.

They are perfectly capable of recognizing useful additions to their crop larder, as is shown by their exuberant adoption of the sweet potato when it arrived.

Eastern U.S. farming became greatly intensified, and densely populated chiefdoms developed along the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

Mexican crop trinity triggered a larger population boom, the so-called Mississippian florescence, which produced the largest towns and most complex societies achieved by Native Americans north of Mexico. But that boom came much too late to prepare Native Americans of the United States for the impending disaster of European colonization.

That outcome also demonstrates that Native Americans were not constrained by cultural conservativism and were quite able to appreciate a good plant when they saw it.

Lest these conclusions be misinterpreted, we should end this chapter with caveats against exaggerating two points: peoples’ readiness to accept better crops and livestock, and the constraints imposed by locally available wild plants and animals.

In that light, we can now answer the question implicit in the title of this chapter. I asked whether the reason for the failure of North American Indians to domesticate North American apples lay with the Indians or with the apples.

This list may at first seem to have glaring omissions. What about the African elephants with which Hannibal’s armies crossed the Alps?

Sheep and alpacas were selected for retention of wool and reduction or loss of hair, while cows have been selected for high milk yields.

For example, did Africa’s abundance of big wild mammals, available to kill by hunting, make it superfluous for Africans to go to the trouble of tending domestic stock?

The interpretation is refuted by five types of evidence: rapid acceptance of Eurasian domesticates by non-Eurasian peoples, the universal human penchant for keeping pets, the rapid domestication of the Ancient Fourteen, the repeated independent domestications of some of them, and the limited successes of modern efforts at further domestications.

Over a century ago, the British scientist Francis Galton summarized this discrepancy succinctly: “It would appear that every wild animal has had its chance of being domesticated, that [a] few...were domesticated long ago, but that the large remainder, who failed sometimes in only one small particular, are destined to perpetual wildness.”

It is especially striking that recent attempts to domesticate eland within Africa itself, where its disease resistance and climate tolerance would give it a big advantage over introduced Eurasian wild stock susceptible to African diseases, have not caught on.

For example, the San Diego and Los Angeles zoos are now subjecting the last surviving California condors to a more draconian control of breeding than that imposed upon any domesticated species.

As we shall now see, rhinos (and most other big mammals) present insuperable obstacles to domestication.

Even among herbivores and omnivores, many species, like koalas, are too finicky in their plant preferences to recommend themselves as farm animals.

Bear meat is an expensive delicacy, grizzlies weigh up to 1,700 pounds, they are mainly vegetarians (though also formidable hunters), their vegetable diet is very broad, they thrive on human garbage (thereby creating big problems in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks), and they grow relatively fast.

Some ancient depictions of horse-like animals used for riding or for pulling carts may refer to onagers. However, all writers about them, from Romans to modern zookeepers, decry their irascible temper and their nasty habit of biting people. As a result, although similar in other respects to ancestral donkeys, onagers have never been domesticated.

Some species are nervous, fast, and programmed for instant flight when they perceive a threat. Other species are slower, less nervous, seek protection in herds, stand their ground when threatened, and don’t run until necessary. Most species of deer and antelope (with the conspicuous exception of reindeer) are of the former type, while sheep and goats are of the latter.

Evidence for just a single domestication thus suggests that, once a wild plant had been domesticated, the crop spread quickly to other areas throughout the wild plant’s range, preempting the need for other independent domestications of the same plant.

Already, though, by 2,000 years ago, Romans were also nourishing themselves with their own hodgepodge of foods that mostly originated elsewhere.

Yet the northward spread of those Andean specialties was stopped completely by the hot intervening lowlands of Central America.

To bring up all those differences isn’t to claim that widely distributed crops are admirable, or that they testify to the superior ingenuity of early Eurasian farmers.

They reflect, instead, the orientation of Eurasia’s axis compared with that of the Americas or Africa. Around those axes turned the fortunes of history.