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

by Jared Diamond

Another supposed dichotomy that becomes blurred in reality is a distinction between food producers as active managers of their land and hunter-gatherers as mere collectors of the land’s wild produce. In reality, some hunter-gatherers intensively manage their land. For example, New Guinea peoples who never domesticated sago palms or mountain pandanus nevertheless increase production of these wild edible plants by clearing away encroaching competing trees, keeping channels in sago swamps clear, and promoting growth of new sago shoots by cutting down mature sago trees. Aboriginal Australians who never reached the stage of farming yams and seed plants nonetheless anticipated several elements of farming. They managed the landscape by burning it, to encourage the growth of edible seed plants that sprout after fires. In gathering wild yams, they cut off most of the edible tuber but replaced the stems and tops of the tubers in the ground so that the tubers would regrow. Their digging to extract the tuber loosened and aerated the soil and fostered regrowth. All that they would have had to do to meet the definition of farmers was to carry the stems and remaining attached tubers home and similarly replace them in soil at their camp.