Thus, one can explain as follows the reasons why the people who spread around the world were Eurasians, not Aboriginal Australians or Native Americans or sub-Saharan Africans. My listeners and readers find this pattern as fascinating as did I: after I give a lecture on Guns, Germs, and Steel, I can often recognize those people nearby who have just come out of my lecture, because they are tracing horizontal and vertical lines in the air as they talk to each other. That’s because crop and livestock species, and people using technologies and social behaviors associated with those species, can spread more rapidly at the same latitude, where they always encounter constant day length and seasonality and similar diseases, than across bands of latitude, where they must adapt to different day lengths and seasonality and diseases. Why did food production arise in only nine regions? Why were those regions not the most fertile and productive regions of modern agriculture, such as California, Europe, Japan, and Java? The value of the domesticated plants and animals also varied among regions: the most numerous and productive suites of domesticated species arose in the Fertile Crescent, followed by China, Mexico, and the Andes, while the least numerous and least productive suites arose in the eastern U.S., New Guinea, and Ethiopia. Food production didn’t arise simultaneously around the world: in most of the world it never arose independently at all it did arise independently in just nine small regions, from which it diffused to other regions and, among those nine regions, it arose more than 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and possibly in China, but only as recently as 2500 BC in the eastern United States.
Here, the bodies of information in the fields of botany and zoology become relevant. One might still wonder: if food production had arisen simultaneously all around the world, then peoples everywhere would have developed complex societies simultaneously, and the subsequent world dominance of Eurasian societies would remain unexplained.
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