Guns, Germs & Steel

by 1300 b.c.

A.D. 43

Widespread iron tools

900 b.c.

500 b.c.

650 b.c.

This table gives approximate dates of widespread adoption of significant developments in three Eurasian and four Native American areas. Dates for animal domestication neglect dogs, which were domesticated earlier than food-producing animals in both Eurasia and
ture surely did not provide the basis for most human calorie intake and sedentary existence in American homelands until much later than in Eurasian homelands.
As we saw in Chapters 5 and 10, only a few relatively small areas of each hemisphere acted as a 'homeland' where food production first arose and from which it then spread. Those homelands were the Fertile Crescent and China in Eurasia, and the Andes and Amazonia, Mesoamerica, and the eastern United States in the Americas. The rate of spread of key developments is especially well understood for Europe, thanks to the many archaeologists at work there. As Table 13.1 summarizes for England, once food production and village living had arrived from the Fertile Crescent after a long lag (5,000 years), the subsequent lag for England's adoption of chiefdoms, states, writing, and especially metal tools was much shorter: 2,000 years for the first widespread metal tools of copper and bronze, and only 250 years for widespread iron tools. Evidently, it was much easier for one society of already sedentary farmers to 'borrow' metallurgy from

HEMISPHERESCOLLIDING • 363

Native America

Andes

Amazonia

Mesoamerica Eastern U.S.

by 3000 B.C.

3000 b.c.

by 3000 b.c. 2500 b.c.

3500 b.c.

p

500 b.c. —

3100-1800 b.c.

6000 b.c.

1500 b.c. 2500 b.c.

3100-1800 b.c.

6000 b.c.

1500 b.c. 500 b.c.

by 1500 b.c.

A.D. 1

1500 b.c. 200 b.c.

A.D. 1000

—— '

—— —— –

A.D.1

300 b.c. —

—