INTA 2040 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Metalworking, Fertile Crescent, Germination
2 Feb 2017
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A.D. stands for Anno Domini, which is Latin for "year of our Lord," and it means
the number of years since the birth of Jesus Christ. That was a little more than
2000 years ago, so the date 500 A.D. means a little more than 1500 years ago.
D 10
The axis of America and Africa is north-south. The axis of Eurasia is east-west. What
effects those differences in axis have on human history? Axis orientation affected the
rate of spread of crops and livestock, and also possibly writing, wheels, and other
inventions.
Food production’s spread proves as crucial to understanding geographic differences
in rise of guns, germs, and steel. In the areas where food producing did not happen
independently, it happened as a result of spread of crops, livestock, and knowledge
of how to grow them and also as a result of migration of farmers and herders.
The main spread of food production were from Southwest Asia to Europe, Egypt and
North Africa, Ethiopia, Central Asia, and the Indus valley; From the Sahel and West
Africa to East and South Africa, From China to tropical Southeast Asia, the
Philippines, Indonesia, Korea, and Japan; and from Mesoamerica to North America.
The dates and rates of the spread of food production varied greatly; at one extreme
was its rapid spread along east-west axis; from southwest Asia both to Europe and
Egypt and east to Indus Valley, and from Philippines east to Polynesia. At the
opposite extreme its slow spread was along north-south axes; from Mexico
northward to the U.S. Southwest.
Preemptive domestication: geographically varying ease of spread
What does it imply if the same crop has been repeatedly and independently
domesticated in several different parts of its wild range, and not just once and in a
single area? Plant domestication involves modification of wild plants so that they
become more useful to humans (larger seeds, less bitter taste, and so on). If a
productive crop is already available, the incipient farmers will surely proceed to
grow it rather than start all over again by gathering the wild relative and
redomesticating it. So, the single domestication means than once a wild plant had
been domesticated, the crop spread quickly to other areas, so there is no need for
domestication of the same plant. But, when we see the independent domestication
of the same wild plant in different areas, we understand that the crop spread too
slowly to preempt its domestication elsewhere.
Evidence for single domestication in in southwest Asia, but multiple domestication
in the Americas, might provide evidence that crops spread more easily out of
southwest Asia than in the Americas.
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