The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  A second observation that we may make from the maps is that the major Old World civilisations – the Assyrians, the Romans, Mohenjo-Daro, the Gupta, the Han and so on – all developed along the great ‘East-West Corridor’, a geographical configuration that takes in, west-to-east, the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez-Red Sea Isthmus, the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the coastline of the Arabian Gulf, of India, Burma and Thailand, and the island chain of South East Asia, all the way round to China. No great daring or stamina would have been needed to navigate these coasts, rivers and isthmuses: the ‘Corridor’ in effect forms a continuous and not inconvenient travel link between the Strait of Gibraltar (latitude 36° n) with the Strait of Singapore (latitude 1° n) and beyond, a distance of just over 10,000 miles. The prevailing winds would have aided sea travel as it developed and there was no shortage of great rivers draining into this corridor. It was a natural asset aiding trade and contact and had no real equivalent in the New World. The layout of the East-West Corridor matches both the pattern of the spread of sailing technology and the distribution of certain myths – these are shown on maps 1 and 4.

  The great steppes of Eurasia, where the horse was first domesticated, was also an east-west configuration. This has had a profound influence on world history, far more than is generally realised. The dimensions of the steppes of the world also feature on map 4.

  We need to make special mention of the Mediterranean Sea. This body of water, besides being totally surrounded by land, being east-west in configuration and located in temperate latitudes, has a number of other features which mark it as one of the most favoured spots on Earth, so far as the development of humankind is concerned. It consists, for example, of many peninsulas, bays and inlets, ecological niches which vary biologically and give the inhabitants a strong sense of place, encouraging competition and exchange. It contains a large number of islands, some of them quite large islands. Being geographically distinct, and distinctive, these islands developed strong local cultural traditions – the obsidian of Melos, the alum of the Lipari Islands, the sulphur of Sicily, the healing earth of Lemos.43 As Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell say, this encouraged ‘connectivity’, an important quality, which helped account for the pre-eminence of the Mediterranean.

  At a time when sea travel was faster and much cheaper than overland travel, people accompanied their goods being traded, with the result that islands in antiquity had much bigger populations than they do now, relatively speaking: which meant that, with so many islands, the Mediterranean was relatively rich in people.44 Connectivity was also aided by the fact that the sea was bordered by so many mountains that much of the Mediterranean was within sight of land.

  Other advantages of the Mediterranean were that it produced so many non-perishable foodstuffs (cereals, cheese, oil, wine) that could be traded, that the absence of large tides (because of the narrowness of the Strait of Gibraltar) meant that relatively more salt was produced in the Mediterranean area, helping to preserve meat products, and that the many rivers draining into the sea provided, in their estuaries, plentiful alluvial wetlands where crops could be grown.45

  DELTAS AND DISEASES

  A still further observation is that at least four of the Old World river systems seem to have helped to spawn great civilisations: Nile → Pharaonic Egypt; Tigris/Euphrates → Assyria/Babylon; Indus/ Sarasvati → Mohenjo-Daro/Harappa; Yangtse → Han. In Egypt, for instance, the Nile flows from south to north but the prevailing wind blows from north to south, facilitating two-way traffic on the river. And again, in marked contrast, none of the major New World rivers – the St Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Magdalena, the Orinoco, the Amazon, the Paraguay or the Plata – was associated with major ancient civilisations. The inhabitants of these regions did of course build villages and in one case, Cahokia, on the Mississippi, began to embark on monumental architecture; but more generally the great rivers of the New World were not associated with great civilisations. The significance of this extraordinary difference may have something to do with the fact that, between 9,500 and 8,000 years ago, river deltas formed throughout the world as a result of a rise in sea levels over the continental shelves. This rise reduced the gradients of rivers, meaning that water flow towards the sea slowed, and rivers naturally meandered more, or silted up, causing occasionally catastrophically abrupt channel shifts. Despite the risks of such abrupt channel shifts, these deltas nonetheless formed the basis of fertile alluvial plains, a process that occurred in Mesopotamia, the Ganges in India, the Nile in Egypt, the Chao Phraya in Thailand, the Mahakam in Borneo and the Yangtze in China. As was mentioned earlier, over forty of these deltas have been dated throughout the world.46 These deltas, or flood plains, created conditions that favoured the kind of plants that tended to grow in the Old World but not those more common in the New World. This configuration had a profound effect on the development of agriculture and of civilisation.

  These geographical/climatic configurations are basic. As we shall see in more detail as the book proceeds, the great East-West Corridor facilitated the transmission of peoples, goods, diseases and ideas between the various regions of the Old World; the cold deep water off the Pacific coast of the New World attracted a unique mix of fish and marine mammals, a world of abundance, which in turn promoted a unique developmental trajectory for early peoples. We must be careful not to oversimplify a complex picture but the different configurations of water in the two hemispheres did ultimately affect everything from agriculture to religion. The development of deltas – alluvial flood-plains – promoted civilisations on the coasts or near seas and oceans, facilitating the transmission of trade, humans and ideas.

  • 6 •

  ROOTS V. SEEDS AND THE ANOMALOUS DISTRIBUTION OF DOMESTICABLE MAMMALS

  These fundamental geographical differences were built on by two other factors. There was, first, a substantial difference between the Old World and the New in regard to plant life. There developed, at the most basic level, two radically different types of agriculture across the globe, each with a notably separate distribution. These two types are seed culture and vegeculture.

  As its name implies, seed culture refers to crops which reproduce sexually, by means of seeds – in particular, grasses/cereals such as wheat, oats, barley, rye, millet, rice and maize and which, with the exception of the last mentioned, were native only in the Old World. Vegeculture, on the other hand, refers to crops such as roots and tubers, manioc, potatoes and yams which reproduce vegetatively. Roots and tubers are not confined to the New World but the Americas are home to many varieties of root and tuber crops, not only yams, canna, manihot and sweet potatoes, but also crops adapted to cool mountainous areas, such as potato, oca, ulluco, arracacha and añu. Map 3 shows the markedly different distribution of these two types of crop around the world.

  From all this it will be clear that seed culture occurs mainly in the drier tropics, subtropics and temperate zones, whereas vegeculture occurs entirely within the tropics. (Roots and tubers were of negligible importance in the Middle East and China.)1

  These two types of plant life – cereals and roots/tubers – also give rise to two types of cultivation, the so-called milpa cultivation and conuco cultivation. Milpa cultivation refers to seeds and is associated with swidden agriculture – that is, where forests are slashed and then burned to create cleared areas – fields – in which the seeds may be planted. Conuco refers to root crop cultivation, often involving the preparation of earth mounds (montones) in which stem cuttings or other vegetative parts are planted. Although the conuco system may employ swidden techniques, many plots of tubers and roots are maintained for years on end in one place.

  Besides their very different distribution across the world, and their different modes of cultivation, there are three other all-important differences between roots and tubers on the one hand, and seed vegetables on the other. First, because roots and tubers grow underground (and are tropical) other vegetation grows above them to form a canopy. This mean
s that the soil in which they grow is far less likely to be eroded (by wind, say) – such soil is, therefore, more likely to remain richer in nutrients. At the same time, the natural growing conditions of roots and tubers mean they can be harvested continuously throughout the year, not all at once like cereals, and that too keeps the soil richer, since there is no annual harvest cycle to denude the ground of its fertility all at once. As we shall see later, this different rhythm also has ceremonial/religious implications.

  The second difference between tubers/roots and cereals is that the former, being almost exclusively tropical plants, are adapted to an ecological system in which there are well-marked wet and dry seasons, requiring the plant to store up sufficient reserves for it to survive the dry months. This means that roots and tubers build up starch to tide them over these times and in fact they are mainly eaten for their starch content, whereas cereals are much richer in protein. The various forms of wheat and barley, for example, consist of 8–14 per cent protein, pulses contain 20–25 per cent, whereas rice and corn and tubers/roots are much lower (taro, for example, contains just 1 per cent protein). It follows that people living off roots and tubers have to go elsewhere for their protein – mainly by hunting animals. Some scholars have even attributed cannibalism to the need of certain tribes to find protein where they can. (This process is known as ‘protein capture’.)2

  The consequences of all this are profound. We should not forget that in some areas of the world – California, Australia, the Argentine pampas, western Europe – plant food production never developed indigenously at all.3 Where it did occur, roots and tubers were, essentially, a much more stable crop system than cereals. The ground is not exhausted anywhere near as quickly as it is under cereal agriculture, which required early cereal cultivators to shift to new terrain every year until earlier fields, lying fallow, had regained their fertility. All this meant that seed cultures (both large seeds like wheat and rice and small seeds like millet) were much more likely to expand into new areas, in contrast to root cultures which remained more or less static. And in fact, in some areas of the world – for example, South East Asia and the West Indies – seed agriculture did spread and take over from vegeculture.4 Vegecultures, on the other hand, tended to settle – and then remain – near river banks, seashores or the edge of savannah areas, where early peoples could supplement their starchy roots with hunting expeditions (or fishing) for protein. It also meant that fertility, or at least the fertility cycle, was much less of an issue in root cultures, and so their religions reflected this principle far less.

  A further aspect of early plant life is the way in which agriculture tended to develop not just with one plant but with ‘packages’ of a small number of plants. These ‘packages’ are known as ‘founder crops’. In the Middle East, for example, the founder crops comprised wheat along with barley, peas and lentils. Agriculture developed in the so-called Fertile Crescent (parts of Palestine, Jordan, Israel, Turkey and Iraq) because its latitude, Mediterranean climate – the largest of its kind in the world – and its mountains meant that harvests of wild grasses could be staggered throughout the autumn at different heights: people could move up and down the slopes as the plants became ripe. This package came about because many cereals, while they do contain protein, are not especially rich in it, but that deficiency is made up for by pulses (peas and lentils) which, as we have seen, can be up to 25 per cent protein (flax was also domesticated as a founder crop, acting – with raffia in Africa and cotton in India – as a source of fibre). As, again, Jared Diamond has pointed out, cereals and pulses together, therefore, ‘provide many of the ingredients of a balanced diet’.5 In the same way, the ‘package’ that developed in China consisted of rice, millet and soybeans (the latter with 38 per cent protein), with hemp for fibre; and in Mesoamerica, the package was corn, beans and squash, with cotton, yucca and agave for fibre.

  Three other crucial differences between cereals and roots/tubers should be noted. One is that cereals grow quickly and, because they quickly denude the land of its fertility, this is another reason why they spread rapidly. The earliest dates known for cultivated cereals is around 10,500 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent in South West Asia. Thus the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent came to meet early man’s basic needs surprisingly well – carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction and transport.6 They spread west to Greece by 8500 BP and to Germany around 7000 BP. Dates for China are at about 9500 BP and the Indus Valley at 9000 BP, with Egypt at 8000 BP. Contrast that with the founder crops in the eastern US, where four plants were domesticated between 4500–3500 BP, a full 6,000 years after wheat and barley were domesticated in the Fertile Crescent. But they were not enough to serve as a complete diet and Native Americans needed to supplement these founder crops by wild foods, mainly wild mammals and water birds. Farming did not become their main activity until 2500–2200 BP, when more seed crops – knotweed and maygrass – were added to their diet, though these were at least high in protein – 17–32 per cent, compared with 8–14 per cent for wheat, 9 per cent for corn and even lower for barley and rice.7 There was nothing wrong with the general environment of the eastern United States so far as growing crops was concerned – the soils were rich and the rainfall reliable. The florescence of culture that developed there did so, however, only at about 200 bc–AD 400, 9,000 years after village life first emerged in the Fertile Crescent and it was not until AD 900 that the Mexican crop trinity (maize, beans, squash) triggered enough surplus to create the towns of the Mississippian florescence, as we shall see in more detail later. The Native Americans of the eastern United States never domesticated local wild pulses, fibre crops or fruit or nut trees.

  There were a number of reasons for this delay in New World domestication. The trajectory of maize was one factor, which is explored in chapter ten. On top of that, a further series of interlocking factors hastened the spread and efficiency of cereals. In the new, drier conditions on Earth that we have been discussing, cereals grew naturally and well where surface water periodically inundated the ground – i.e., the flood plains of river basins (often near or in the relatively new deltas). Roots and tubers, on the other hand, dislike waterlogged ground. This may be a more important difference than it looks. Cereals could grow on the flood plain/deltas, meaning that early peoples in the Old World often developed their societies at the mouths of rivers – near the seas and oceans, which facilitated contact with others. Root and tuber peoples, on the other hand, established their societies above the flood plains, because roots and tubers cannot grow in waterlogged soil. So these societies tended to be confined to the higher river valleys (away from seas and oceans) where contact with other peoples was naturally more limited by the terrain. This isolation, as was mentioned earlier, further encouraged the emergence of dialects, and then mutually incomprehensible languages, in a vicious circle. In the Old World the agricultural developments encouraged movement and contact – and therefore competition – whereas in the New World early agriculture, much of it anyway, discouraged contact.

  Second, the rewards of cereal cultivation are greater than that for any other form of agriculture.8 The gathering and threshing of grain is less laborious than the digging of roots and, for any given volume of plant, the food value is greater. Emmer wheat and barley have big seeds and can be easily harvested. Also, because annual plants (which is what cereals are) put little energy into making woody or fibrous stems (because they don’t need to last through the winter), they put all their effort into producing large seeds. It has been calculated, therefore, that cereals can produce a ton of seeds per hectare, yielding 50 kilocalories for every one kilocalorie of work. Another, and perhaps more interesting reason, was that the organisation needed to harvest cereals, which matured only once a year, was much greater than with roots and tubers. This would have encouraged communal life and had religious consequences. Perhaps most important of all, cereals can be stored easily and remain in a near-perfect state for months on end. Surpluses may there
fore be more easily accumulated, in the first place to protect increasingly dense populations against crop failure, and then to be used as the basis of exchange/trade. Surpluses are also eventually necessary for supporting non-food-producing specialists, such as scribes, priests, kings, artists, which are such a feature of civilisations. Roots and tubers are dug up as needed – under such circumstances the concept of ‘surplus’ is harder to imagine.

  This development also interlocked with the invention/introduction of ‘broadcast’ seeding, fields with one crop only, where the farmer throws handfuls of seeds across a wide expanse. This really only works with the advent of ploughing – otherwise broadcast seeding would merely be a way of feeding the birds. So this too is an interlocking matter with the domestication of animals: men could handle simple ploughs but cattle could pull much heavier loads, deepening the furrows of the land (see chapter seven). This meant in turn that fields could be given over to one crop, further improving yield and efficiency. In the New World, however, where there were few animals to domesticate, and where, to begin with certainly, roots and tubers were the founder crops, even such seeds as there were, were planted individually by hand, with the help of a hoe. As a consequence, most New World fields became ‘mixed gardens’, and this too, of course, obviated any need for a plough, in another vicious circle.

  One other factor concerning plant life needs to be singled out. The New World, in particular Meso- and South America, contains 85 per cent of the known psychoactive plants that grow on Earth. This too is happenstance but, combined with the distribution of shamanism across the world, and the route by which early humans entered the Americas, via Beringia, it was a coincidence that was to have such profound consequences that an entire chapter will be devoted to the subject (see chapter twelve).