barley, knotweed, goosefoot New Guinea sugar cane —
Mesoamerica, India, Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa, and South America, supplemented in several of those areas by wool from domestic animals. Of the centers of early food production, only the eastern United States and New Guinea remained without a fiber crop. Alongside these parallels, there were also some major differences in food production systems around the world. One is that agriculture in much of the Old World came to involve broadcast seeding and monoculture fields, and eventually plowing. That is, seeds were sown by being HOW TO MAKEan ALMOND • I Z J Croft Type fiber Roots,Tubers Melons flax — muskmelon hemp — note 6 cotton (G. hirsutum), jicama squashes (C. pepo, etc.) yucca, agave cotton (G. barbadense) manioc, sweet squashes (C. maxima, etc.) potato, potato, oca cotton G. herbaceum) African yams watermelon, bottle gourd cotton (G. arboreum), — cucumber flax note 7 – – — Jerusalem artichoke squash (C. pepo)
— yams, taro — The table gives major crops, of five crop classes, from early agricultural sites in various parts of the world. Square brackets enclose names of crops first domesticated elsewhere; names not enclosed in brackets refer to local domesticates. Omitted are crops that arrived or became important only later, such as bananas in Africa, corn and beans in the eastern United States, and sweet potato in New Guinea. Cottons are four species of the genus Gossypium, each species being native to a particular part of the world; squashes are five species of the genus Cucurbita. Note that cereals, pulses, and fiber crops launched agriculture in most areas, but that root and tuber crops and melons were of early importance in only some areas. I Z 8 • GUNS, GERMS,and steel thrown in handfuls, resulting in a whole field devoted to a single crop. Once cows, horses, and other large mammals were domesticated, they were hitched to plows, and fields were tilled by animal power. In the New World, however, no animal was ever domesticated that could be hitched to a plow. Instead, fields were always tilled by hand-held sticks or hoes, and seeds were planted individually by hand and not scattered as whole handfuls. Most New World fields thus came to be mixed gardens of many crops planted together, rather than monoculture. Another major difference among agricultural systems involved the main sources of calories and carbohydrates. As we have seen, these were cereals in many areas. In other areas, though, that role of cereals was taken over or shared by roots and tubers, which were of negligible importance in the ancient Fertile Crescent and China. Manioc (alias cassava) and sweet potato became staples in tropical South America, potato and oca in the Andes, African yams in Africa, and Indo-Pacific yams and taro in Southeast Asia and New Guinea. Tree crops, notably bananas and breadfruit, also furnished carbohydrate-rich staples in Southeast Asia and New Guinea. 1 hus, by roman times, almost all of today's leading crops were being cultivated somewhere in the world. Just as we shall see for domestic animals too (Chapter 9), ancient hunter-gatherers were intimately familiar with local wild plants, and ancient farmers evidently discovered and domesticated almost all of those worth domesticating. Of course, medieval monks did begin to cultivate strawberries and raspberries, and modern plant breeders are still improving ancient crops and have added new minor crops, notably some berries (like blueberries, cranberries, and kiwifruit) and nuts (macadamias, pecans, and cashews). But these few modern additions have remained of modest importance compared with ancient staples like wheat, corn, and rice. Still, our list of triumphs lacks many wild plants that, despite their value as food, we never succeeded in domesticating. Notable among these failures of ours are oak trees, whose acorns were a staple food of Native Americans in California and the eastern United States as well as a fallback food for European peasants in famine times of crop failure. Acorns are nutritionally valuable, being rich in
