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

by Jared Diamond

final advantage of early food production in the Fertile Crescent is that it may have faced less competition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle than that in some other areas, including the western Mediterranean. 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). One of the important mammal species hunted for meat, the gazelle, originally lived in huge herds but was overexploited by the growing human population and reduced to low numbers. Thus, the food production package quickly became superior to the hunter-gatherer package. Sedentary villages based on cereals were already in existence before the rise of food production and predisposed those hunter-gatherers to agriculture and herding. In the Fertile Crescent the transition from hunting-gathering to food production took place relatively fast: as late as 9000 B.C. people still had no crops and domestic animals and were entirely dependent on wild foods, but by 6000 B.C. some societies were almost completely dependent on crops and domestic animals.