Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

by Edward Slingerland

As Henrich also observes, a particular historical experiment displays the danger of trying to wing it in the absence of traditional cultural memory. In the early seventeenth century, the Portuguese, noting that manioc is easy to grow and provides impressive yields even in marginal cropland, imported it to Africa from South America. It quickly spread to become an important staple crop in the region, and still is today. Yet the Portuguese neglected to also import the South American indigenous cultural knowledge about how to properly detoxify manioc. The difficulty of reinventing the wheel, as it were, is dramatically illustrated by the fact that many contemporary Africans, hundreds of years after the introduction of manioc, continue to suffer from health problems caused by low-level cyanide poisoning.34 The point, Henrich concludes, is that “cultural evolution is often much smarter than we are.”