Must Read...

[Reedtb2@cs.com]

Stovers:

Did you ever wonder why Civilization originated in the Fertile Crescent,
rather than say, California or New Guinea (similar climates, similar wild
crops)?

Jared Diamond addresses this vital question in 400 pages in "Guns, Germs and
Steel" (Norton Press, papaerback, $16).  

Since we here are vitally interested in the various kinds of domesticated
foods, we read...

.. reflect that the vast majorityof wild plants are unsuitable for
cultivation for obvious reasons: the are woody, they produce no edible fruit
and their leaves and roots are inedible.  Of the 200,000 wild plant species,
only a few thoousand are eaten by humans, and jus a few hunded of these have
been more or less domesticated. Even of these several hundred crops, most
provide minor supplements tour diet and would not by themselves have sufficed
to support the rise of civilizations.  A mere dozen species account for over
80 percent of the modern world's annual tonnage of allcrops.   

Those dozen blockbusters are the cereals wheat, corn, rice, barley and
sorghum; the pulse soybean; the roots or tubers potato, manioc and sweet
potato; the sugar sources sugarcane and sugar beet; and the fruit banana.  
...   Our failure to domesticate even asingle major new food plant in modern
times suggewts that ancient peoples really may have explored virtualoly all
useful wild plants and domesticated all the ones worth domesticating.  

The book is a history of the rise of (so called) civilizations and why they
occur where they do (and implicitly how they can occur elsewhere).  
Fascinating!

(Thanks, Paul Kilburn and I'll get my own copy as soon as I wear out
yours....)

Onward....           TOM REED              BEF