Jared Diamond 1999, Guns, Germs & Steel Chapter 8: Apples or Indians?

1. Jared Diamond 1999, Guns, Germs & SteelChapter 8: Apples or Indians?

2. The Fertile Crescent

3. Importance of a ‘crop package’ • Many domesticable plants and animals necessary to make a food-producing existence worthwhile • We need to assess the potential of an entire local flora for domestication. • What were the advantages of the native flora and fauna of the Fertile Crescent?

4. Advantage #1 • Mediterranean climate (long, hot, dry summers) selects for annuals. • Annuals tend to put their energy into producing big seeds (ready to sprout quickly when the rain comes). • Many of the big seeds are edible by humans (cereals and pulses). • 6 of the world’s 12 major crops today are annuals. Annual seeds well adapted to being held in long storage by humans

5. Advantage #2 • Crops were already abundant and highly productive in the wild. • “…annual harvests of up to nearly a ton of seeds per hectare can be obtained, yielding 50 kilocalories of food energy for only one kilocalorie of work expended.” • Thus hunter-gatherers were yielding a surplus that they needed to store. To store the surplus they needed to stay in the one place. • Thus, even before domesticating plants, they could easily make one of the major transitions necessary.

6. Advantage #2 continued… • Crops like wheat and barley did not need to evolve to become really useful – they already were. • By contrast, the corn found in America took thousands of years of selective planting to become as big and calorific as it is today.

7. Fertile Crescent Advantage # 3 • The reproductive biology of many crops found in the Fertile Crescent were great for farming because they are self-pollinating. • This meant that when farmers located a productive mutant and planted it, the mutant maintained its productive qualities (rather than cross-pollinating with an other less productive species).

8. Fertile Crescent as a Mediterranean zone • Large • High diversity of plants and animal species + high percentage of annual plants = high diversity of annuals • 32 of the world’s 56 prize grasses (with big, edible seeds) • Wide range of altitudes and topographies > staggered harvest seasons • Many ancestors of domesticated big mammals: pig; sheep; goat; cow • 8 founder crops: 2 wheats; barley; chickpea; pea; lentil; bitter vetch; flax (fiber)

9. Great biological package explains the advent of food production in the Fertile Crescent