The Fertile Crescent Had Lots of Grass

The motivating question in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is clearly articulated in the prologue.  It was asked of Diamond by a native of New Guinea decades ago, and has been asked in one form or another by people for centuries.  “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”  Put in a more general form, the question is phrased elsewhere in the book as, “Why did history unfold differently on different continents?”

That question, and the dozens of questions that spring from it, are frequently answered with an undercurrent of implicit racism.  We explain Eurasia’s primacy in developing agriculture, domesticating animals, and eventually creating societies that allowed for the invention of advanced technologies in terms of the people who lived there.  People who would normally blanch at the suggestion that they harbor racist assumptions fall back on what amounts to racist explanations when considering the difference in the states of civilizations in Europe and the New World at the time of Columbus.

Explanations that rely on presumed racial differences to explain the Eurasian development of plant and animal domestication hide a much more prosaic reality.  Human nature and capability is fairly universal, and something other than racial differences explains the reason that agriculture developed in Fertile Crescent before it spread to or developed in the rest of the world.

In order for agriculture to develop, the raw materials, in the form of wild grasses or grains suitable for domestication, are required.  Botanists have studied wild grass distributions, and find that the Fertile Crescent has an enormous advantage in terms of the number of promising wild species which are native to the area.  When gathering wild seeds, early hunter gatherers would naturally favor grasses with the largest seeds.  Botanists have identified 56 prize wild grass species with especially large seeds, and find that 32 of these wild grass species are native to the Fertile Crescent, or to nearby parts of western Eurasia.  Compared to other areas where agriculture developed independently, no other region offered early man nearly as many promising species for plant domestication.  Mesoamerica, the region that has the second highest number of promising wild grains, has only 5 wild species ideal for domestication.  Not coincidentally, agriculture developed in Mesoamerica 5,000 years after it did so in the Fertile Crescent.

One reason that agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent before anywhere else in the world has less to do with racial differences, and more to do with the available wild grass species that flourished in the area.  The domestication of those wild grains would support a higher population density that would allow for the development of such technological advances as writing and the wheel. The concentration in the Fertile Crescent of the biological building blocks necessary for the development of agriculture is a better explanation for the different rates that human societies developed than looking to Providence or racial differences for that explanation.