More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
All of them were high in protein—17–32 percent, compared with 8–14 percent for wheat, 9 percent for corn, and even lower for barley and white rice. Two of them, sunflower and sumpweed, were also high in oil (45–47 percent). Sumpweed, in particular, would have been a nutritionist’s ultimate dream, being 32 percent protein and 45 percent oil.
around A.D. 1100 completed Mexico’s crop trinity of corn, beans, and squash.
Local Native Americans did develop an agriculture based on local domesticates, did thereby support themselves in villages, and even developed a cultural florescence (the Hopewell culture centered on what is today Ohio) around 200 B.C.-A.D. 400.
these local failures or limitations of food production cannot be attributed to competition from bountiful hunting opportunities.
Aboriginal societies in recent millennia appear to have been evolving on a trajectory that would eventually have led to indigenous food production. They had already built winter villages. They had begun to manage their environment intensively for fish production by building fish traps, nets, and even long canals.
THE WILD ANCESTORS of the Ancient Fourteen were spread unevenly over the globe. South America had only one such ancestor, which gave rise to the llama and alpaca. North America, Australia, and sub-Saharan Africa had none at all. The lack of domestic mammals indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa is especially astonishing, since a main reason why tourists visit Africa today is to see its abundant and diverse wild mammals. In contrast, the wild ancestors of 13 of the Ancient Fourteen (including all of the Major Five) were confined to Eurasia.
Thus, among the thousands of culturally diverse native peoples of Australia, the Americas, and Africa, no universal cultural taboo stood in the way of animal domestication.
Surely, if some local wild mammal species of those continents had been domesticable, some Australian, American, and African peoples would have domesticated them and gained great advantage from them, just as they benefited from the Eurasian domestic animals that they immediately adopted when those became available.
The suggestion here is that the adoption of domesticable animals and plants follows a process similar to evolution by natural selection. By random chance, some groups of humans would have accidentally domesticated an animal, noted its usefulness, and gained an advantage over other groups. This advantage would have been passed on to their successors.
Other groups, noting this advantage, would have then adopted the practice themselves.
All these facts indicate that the explanation for the lack of native mammal domestication outside Eurasia lay with the locally available wild mammals themselves, not with the local peoples.
species for whose dates of domestication we have archaeological evidence were domesticated between about 8000 and 2500 B.C.—that is, within the first few thousand years of the sedentary farming-herding societies that arose after the end of the last Ice Age.
it takes around 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a 1,000-pound cow. If instead you want to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn.
Efforts at domestication went as far as hitching them to carts: they were tried out as draft animals in 19th-century South Africa, and the eccentric Lord Walter Rothschild drove through the streets of London in a carriage pulled by zebras.
Zebras are also virtually impossible to lasso with a rope—even for cowboys who win rodeo championships by lassoing horses—because of their unfailing ability to watch the rope noose fly toward them and then to duck their head out of the way.
When the herd is on the move, its members maintain a stereotyped order: in the rear, the stallion; in the front, the top-ranking female, followed by her foals in order of age, with the youngest first; and behind her, the other mares in order of rank, each followed by her foals in order of age. In that way, many adults can coexist in the herd without constant fighting and with each knowing its rank.
How was this even figured out?
As young animals grow up in such a herd, they imprint on the animals that they regularly see nearby. Under wild conditions those are members of their own species, but captive young herd animals also see humans nearby and imprint on humans as well.
Second, Australia and the Americas, but not Eurasia or Africa, lost most of their candidates in a massive wave of late-Pleistocene extinctions—
and from the Philippines east to Polynesia (at 3.2 miles per year). At the opposite extreme was its slow spread along north-south axes: at less than 0.5 miles per year, from Mexico northward to the U.S. Southwest;
Where exactly if the "continental" axis here? How exactly is it faster over water than over land?
and from the Philippines east to Polynesia (at 3.2 miles per year). At the opposite extreme was its slow spread along north-south axes: at less than 0.5 miles per year, from Mexico northward to the U.S. Southwest;
This isn't much slower than the Fertile Crescent to Indus Valley rate.
Most of the wild plant species from which our crops were derived vary genetically from area to area, because alternative mutations had become established among the wild ancestral populations of different areas.
Goes along with YNH's point in Sapiens about how the history proceeds towards unification
However, when we find evidence that the same wild ancestor was domesticated independently in different areas, we infer that the crop spread too slowly to preempt its domestication elsewhere.
All of Southwest Asia’s founder crops preempted domestication of any of their close relatives throughout the whole expanse of western Eurasia.
food production spread more readily out of Southwest Asia than in the Americas, and possibly also than in sub-Saharan Africa.
Daniel Zohary and botanist Maria Hopf, in which they illustrate how the wave had reached Greece and Cyprus and the Indian subcontinent by 6500 B.C., Egypt soon after 6000 B.C., central Europe by 5400 B.C., southern Spain by 5200 B.C., and Britain around 3500 B.C.
If crops only reached Britain 5500 YBP, that's only 1000 years before, say, Mexico. What explains the differences in development then?
But most food production in outlying areas depended initially on Fertile Crescent domesticates. Their spread was soon followed by that of other innovations originating in or near the Fertile Crescent, including the wheel, writing, metalworking techniques, milking, fruit trees, and beer and wine production.
all cultivated peas share the same recessive gene that prevents ripe pods of cultivated peas from spontaneously popping open and spilling their peas, as wild pea pods do.
Localities distributed east and west of each other at the same latitude share exactly the same day length and its seasonal variations. To a lesser degree, they also tend to share similar diseases, regimes of temperature and rainfall, and habitats or biomes (types of vegetation).
typical American fast-food restaurant meal would include chicken (first domesticated in China) and potatoes (from the Andes) or corn (from Mexico), seasoned with black pepper (from India) and washed down with a cup of coffee (of Ethiopian origin).
Of Roman crops, only oats and poppies were native to Italy. Roman staples were the Fertile Crescent founder package, supplemented by quince (originating in the Caucasus); millet and cumin (domesticated in Central Asia); cucumber, sesame, and citrus fruit (from India); and chicken, rice, apricots, peaches, and foxtail millet (originally from China). Even though Rome’s apples were at least native to western Eurasia, they were grown by means of grafting techniques that had developed in China and spread westward from there.
eastward spread of a subtropical package that was initially assembled in South China and that received additions on reaching tropical Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and New Guinea.
How on earth can this be considered East-West?
The cool highlands of Mexico would have provided ideal conditions for raising llamas, guinea pigs, and potatoes, all domesticated in the cool highlands of the South American Andes. Yet the northward spread of those Andean specialties was stopped completely by the hot intervening lowlands of Central America. Five thousand years after llamas had been domesticated in the Andes, the Olmecs, Maya, Aztecs, and all other native societies of Mexico remained without pack animals and without any edible domestic mammals except for dogs.
In certain other parts of the world, slow north–south diffusion was important on a smaller scale. These other examples include the snail’s pace of crop exchange between Pakistan’s Indus Valley and South India, the slow spread of South Chinese food production into Peninsular Malaysia, and the failure of tropical Indonesian and New Guinean food production to arrive in prehistoric times in the modern farmlands of southwestern and southeastern Australia, respectively.
The lack of a high-elevation plateau in Mesoamerica south of Guatemala, and Mesoamerica’s extreme narrowness south of Mexico and especially in Panama, were at least as important as the latitudinal gradient in throttling crop and livestock exchanges between the highlands of Mexico and the Andes.
Why was the exchange of nasty germs between the Americas and Europe so unequal? Why didn’t Native American diseases instead decimate the Spanish invaders, spread back to Europe, and wipe out 95 percent of Europe’s population?
Those parasites pass to a person from an eaten animal, but the virus causing laughing sickness (kuru) in the New Guinea highlands used to pass to a person from another person who was eaten. It was transmitted by cannibalism, when highland babies made the fatal mistake of licking their fingers after playing with raw brains that their mothers had just cut out of dead kuru victims awaiting cooking.
The skin lesions caused by smallpox similarly spread microbes by direct or indirect body contact (occasionally very indirect, as when U.S. whites bent on wiping out “belligerent” Native Americans sent them gifts of blankets previously used by smallpox patients).
Cholera epidemics come at longer intervals, the 1991 Peruvian epidemic being the first one to reach the New World during the 20th century.
The greatest single epidemic in human history was the one of influenza that killed 21 million people at the end of the First World War.
First, they spread quickly and efficiently from an infected person to nearby healthy people, with the result that the whole population gets exposed within a short time. Second, they’re “acute” illnesses: within a short time, you either die or recover completely. Third, the fortunate ones of us who do recover develop antibodies that leave us immune against a recurrence of the disease for a long time, possibly for the rest of our life. Finally, these diseases tend to be restricted to humans; the microbes causing them tend not to live in the soil or in other animals.
Studies show that measles is likely to die out in any human population numbering fewer than half a million people.
If the rise of farming was thus a bonanza for our microbes, the rise of cities was a greater one, as still more densely packed human populations festered under even worse sanitation conditions.
Another bonanza was the development of world trade routes, which by Roman times effectively joined the populations of Europe, Asia, and North Africa into one giant breeding ground for microbes. That’s when smallpox finally reached Rome, as the Plague of Antoninus, which killed millions of Roman citizens between A.D. 165 and 180.
Among animals, too, epidemic diseases require large, dense populations and don’t afflict just any animal: they’re confined mainly to social animals providing the necessary large populations.
The first stage is illustrated by dozens of diseases that we now and then pick up directly from our pets and domestic animals.
In the second stage a former animal pathogen evolves to the point where it does get transmitted directly between people and causes epidemics.
A third stage in the evolution of our major diseases is represented by former animal pathogens that did establish themselves in humans, that have not (not yet?) died out, and that may or may not still become major killers of humanity.
The final stage of this evolution is represented by the major, long-established epidemic diseases confined to humans. These diseases must have been the evolutionary survivors of far more pathogens that tried to make the jump to us from animals—and mostly failed.
Apparently, just as with myxomatosis, those syphilis spirochetes that evolved so as to keep their victims alive for longer were thereby able to transmit their spirochete offspring into more victims.
When Hernando de Soto became the first European conquistador to march through the southeastern United States, in 1540, he came across Indian town sites abandoned two years earlier because the inhabitants had died in epidemics.
WHILE OVER A dozen major infectious diseases of Old World origins became established in the New World, perhaps not a single major killer reached Europe from the Americas.
Since the Aztecs, Incas, and Mississippi Valley natives had complex civilisations with farming and high population densities, where are the germs that evolved in these societies? Was it because they did not have too many domesticated or wild animals to acquire them from?
Why didn’t Tenochtitlán have awful germs waiting for the Spaniards?
