Ultimately, it came down to geographic luck. The inequalities of the world were born from
the crops we eat. Americans have had an advantage because for
centuries they've grown crops that are more nutritious and productive.
Crops like wheat, which provides about a fifth of all the calories they eat.
The wealth of modern America could never have been sustained by taro and bananas.
But could plants alone really have the power to shape the course of human history?
Or was there something else at play? Another reason for the division of the world
into haves and have nots? Another steady source of food?
We begin to see a process of animal domestication, by which we mean humans were controlling where
they were moving, they were controlling their feeding, and they were controlling their breeding.
Instead of having to go out to hunt, you have a dependable meat supply.
Animals could be used for their milk, providing an ongoing source of protein.
Their hair and skins could be used to make clothes for extra warmth.
And the combination of these particular animals and plants becomes an extremely attractive
package in that after the harvest period, animals could be turned out on the stubble,
and they can actually eat the remains of the cereal crop harvest.
In their turn, animal dung can be used to provide a fertilizer.
Goats and sheep were the first animals to be domesticated in the ancient world, and
were eventually followed by the big farm animals of today.
All of them were used at first for their meat, but they all proved useful in other ways,
especially with the invention of the plow. Before the industrial revolution, beasts of
burden were the most powerful machines on the planet.
A horse or an ox, harnessed to a a plow, could transform the productivity of the land.
And where did the ancestors of these animals come from?
None was from New Guinea or Australia, or sub-Saharan Africa, or the whole continent
of North America. South America had the ancestor of just one
large, domestic animal, the llama. The big four livestock animals - cows, pigs,
sheep, and goats - were native to the Middle East.
Little wonder that this area became known as the Fertile Crescent, in the middle of
a huge land mass: Eurasia. There were plenty of places for farming to
spread and, crucially, many of those places were to the east and west of Fertile Crescent,
at roughly the same line of of latitude. Why is that so important?
Because any two points of the globe that share the same latitude automatically share the
same length of day, and they all can share a similar climate and vegetation.
Crops or animals domesticated in the Fertile Crescent were able to prosper at other places
along the east-west axis of Eurasia. Wheat and barley, sheep and goats, cows and
pigs, all spread from the Fertile Crescent, east towards India and west towards North Africa
and Europe. Wherever they went, they transformed human
societies. Once the crops and animals of the Fertile
Crescent reached Egypt, they caused an explosion of civilization.
Suddenly, there was enough food to feed the pharaohs and generals, the engineers and scribes,
and the armies of people required to build the pyramids.
The same is true of European civilization. From ancient times until the Renaissance,
the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent fed the artists, inventors, and soldiers of Europe.
In the 16th century, the same crops and animals
were taken by Europeans to the New World. At the time, there was not a single cow or
ear of wheat in all the Americas. Now there a hundred million cattle in the
U. S. alone, and Americans consume 20,000,000 tons of wheat a year.
Modern, industrialized America would be unthinkable
without the spread of farming from the Fertile Crescent.