The Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving had books, firearms, and sailing ships. The Indians were still living in the Stone Age, hunting deer and turkeys with flint-tipped arrows and traveling in birch bark canoes.
Why the radical difference in the two societies? Agriculture, says biological historian Jared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel (Norton, 1999). Europe’s civilization got hold of a better set of crop plants and potentially domestic animals than America’s Indians.
Europe was blessed with such high-yielding grains as wheat and barley and nutritious peas. They were native to the Middle East, but spread to Europe quite naturally since Eurasia is one huge land mass and shares the same day-length. (Plants are sensitive to day-length)
Europe’s crop plants, along with its domestic cattle, sheep, hogs and chickens, provided a marketable surplus of high-quality food for cities thousands of years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
The extra food supplied workers who built roads and bridges, and high walls to protect the cities against marauders. The cities developed medicine, mathematics and law. They developed sea-going navigation and brought back still more ideas and useful crops from far-away places. Urban universities assembled knowledge and taught it to young people.
Asia had rice and millet, beans and soybeans for protein, and many fruits and vegetables. Irrigated rice, in particular, permitted Chinese cities to flourish long before Europe’s.
The Indian cultures in America were never able to consistently support cities. They depended primarily on corn and hunting, since they had no domestic animals except the dog — and the horse, after it was re-introduced by the Europeans. (The Indians had hunted their own horses and cattle to extinction before domestication occurred to them.)
It took centuries of selective breeding for the Indians to turn teosinte’s tiny kernels into the corn the Pilgrims saw in Massachusetts. And centuries more for corn to spread north and south into America’s different north-and-south climatic zones.
If the Indians of temperate Massachusetts had traveled south, they wouldn’t have found a set of cropping conditions like their own until they reached Argentina on the other side of sweltering tropical rain forests and the mountains of Central America.
(The Aztecs had invented the wheel, but had no draft animals, so it remained a child’s toy. The Incas had the llama, but no wheel. The Isthmus of Panama kept them from putting the two together.)
Europe’s cows turned grass into milk and meat. The sheep added wool for warm clothing. Donkeys and oxen provided draft power.
The Indians had the elk and the huge, ill-tempered bison. They broadened those animals’ grassland range by burning forests, but they couldn’t milk them or pull plows.
Dr. Diamond says even the European diseases, which eventually did more to conquer the Indians than any other factor, mostly developed through the close association between farming peoples and their domesticated livestock.
Drought-ravaged Africa still cannot support cities effectively except where “alien†crops (corn, sorghum, sweet potatoes) and farming technologies (fertilizer, pesticides) have been introduced. Africa’s native millet was a low-yield grain. Its tropical pests were dreadful, including malaria and the sleeping sickness which strikes both humans and their domestic animals.
Africa got the zebra instead of the horse. (Zebras bite viciously and don’t let go.) The African water buffalo is the most dangerous mammal on a continent of dangerous mammals.
Africa is still struggling to get beyond subsistence farming, and support the cities and “knowledge industries†that are fundamental to high standards of living and health.
The Pilgrims certainly deserved to feel thankful on that first Thanksgiving. They had inherited the best agriculture and technology assembled from thousands of years of global human experience, and they had just brought their heritage to a huge new continent.
The Pilgrim’s descendents then took the next step: applying science to farming. Thus they created the high-yield agriculture that permits Thanksgiving 2002 to celebrate ample human food along with having wildlands set aside for Nature.
