Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

HISTORY'SHAVES AND HAVE-NOTS • 99

Figure 5.1. Centers of origin of food production. A question mark indicates some uncertainty whether the rise of food production at that centerwas really uninfluenced by the spread of food production from other centers, or (in the case of New Guinea) what the earliest crops were.
nous wild plants in Ethiopia. As for New Guinea, archaeological studies there have provided evidence of early agriculture well before food production in any adjacent areas, but the crops grown have not been definitely identified.
Table 5.1 summarizes, for these and other areas of local domestication, some of the best-known crops and animals and the earliest known dates of domestication. Among these nine candidate areas for the independent evolution of food production, Southwest Asia has the earliest definite dates for both plant domestication (around 8500 b.c.) and animal domestication (around 8000 B.C.); it also has by far the largest number of accurate radiocarbon dates for early food production. Dates for China are nearly as early, while dates for the eastern United States are clearly about 6,000 years later. For the other six candidate areas, the earliest well-established dates do not rival those for Southwest Asia, but too few early sites have been securely dated in those six other areas for us to be certain that they really lagged behind Southwest Asia and (if so) by how much.
The next group of areas consists of ones that did domesticate at least a

I O O • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
table 5.1 Examples of Species Domesticated in Each Area
Area Domesticated Earliest
Attested
Date of
Plants Animals Domestication
Independent Origins of Domestication
1. Southwest Asia wheat, pea, olive sheep, goat 8500 b.c.
2. China rice, millet pig, silkworm by 7500 B.C.
3. Mesoamerica corn, beans, turkey by 3500 b.c.
squash
4. Andes and potato, manioc llama, guinea by 3500 b.c.
Amazonia pig
5. Eastern United sunflower, none 2500 B.C.
States goosefoot
? 6. Sahel sorghum, Afri– guinea fowl by 5000 b.c.
can rice
? 7. Tropical West African yams, none by 3000 b.c.
Africa oil palm
? 8. Ethiopia coffee, teff none ?
? 9. New Guinea sugar cane, none 7000 b.c.?
banana
Local Domestication Following Arrival of Founder Crops from Elsewhere
10. Western Europe poppy, oat none 6000-3500 b.c.
11. Indus Valley sesame, eggplant humped cattle 7000 B.C.
12. Egypt sycamore fig, donkey, cat 6000 b.c.
chufa
couple of local plants or animals, but where food production depended mainly on crops and animals that were domesticated elsewhere. Those imported domesticates may be thought of as "founder" crops and animals, because they founded local food production. The arrival of founder domesticates enabled local people to become sedentary, and thereby increased the likelihood of local crops' evolving from wild plants that were gathered, brought home and planted accidentally, and later planted intentionally.

HISTORY'SHAVES AND HAVE-NOTS • I O I
In three or four such areas, the arriving founder package came from Southwest Asia. One of them is western and central Europe, where food production arose with the arrival of Southwest Asian crops and animals between 6000 and 3500 b.c., but at least one plant (the poppy, and probably oats and some others) was then domesticated locally. Wild poppies are confined to coastal areas of the western Mediterranean. Poppy seeds are absent from excavated sites of the earliest farming communities in eastern Europe and Southwest Asia; they first appear in early farming sites in western Europe. In contrast, the wild ancestors of most Southwest Asian crops and animals were absent from western Europe. Thus, it seems clear that food production did not evolve independently in western Europe. Instead, it was triggered there by the arrival of Southwest Asian domesticates. The resulting western European farming societies domesticated the poppy, which subsequently spread eastward as a crop.
Another area where local domestication appears to have followed the arrival of Southwest Asian founder crops is the Indus Valley region of the Indian subcontinent. The earliest farming communities there in the seventh millennium B.C. utilized wheat, barley, and other crops that had been previously domesticated in the Fertile Crescent and that evidently spread to the Indus Valley through Iran. Only later did domesticates derived from indigenous species of the Indian subcontinent, such as humped cattle and sesame, appear in Indus Valley farming communities. In Egypt as well, food production began in the sixth millennium b.c. with the arrival of Southwest Asian crops. Egyptians then domesticated the sycamore fig and a local vegetable called chufa.
The same pattern perhaps applies to Ethiopia, where wheat, barley, and other Southwest Asian crops have been cultivated for a long time. Ethiopians also domesticated many locally available wild species to obtain crops most of which are still confined to Ethiopia, but one of them (the coffee bean) has now spread around the world. However, it is not yet known whether Ethiopians were cultivating these local plants before or only after the arrival of the Southwest Asian package.
In these and other areas where food production depended on the arrival of founder crops from elsewhere, did local hunter-gatherers themselves adopt those founder crops from neighboring farming peoples and thereby become farmers themselves? Or was the founder package instead brought by invading farmers, who were thereby enabled to outbreed the local hunters and to kill, displace, or outnumber them?