AMERICA'S CLAIM

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 133, 2 December 1936, Page 20

AMERICA'S CLAIM

HOME OF AGRICULTURE

A REVOLUTIONARY THEORY

REMAKING HISTORY

Is civilisation older in America than it is in the Old World? asks Dr. Frank Thone in the "San Francisco Chronicle." Were there,temples and cities in Mayaland and Peru before men builty such mighty works in Egypt and Babylonia? Did Indian farmers raise crops of corn and tobacco centuries earlier than white and yellow cultivators had harvests of wheat and'rice and grapes? . The very idea is upsetting to all the orthodox ancient history we learned, back in high school days.. Civilisation originated in Egypt, or maybe across the way in Mesopotamia—the book was a little vague about that. The native American cultures of Mexico. Yucatan',- and the South American highlands were assumed to be considerably, later. Anyway, they didn't count, because the unmannerly Spanish conquistadores had "destroyed" them. But history changes as the world grows older and scholars dig more carefully into the past. We now know of others'cehtres of culture in the Old World, older perhaps than Egypt. More important still," we have learned a great deal more about the early native civilisation of our own continent, which in spite of its supposed" "destruction" contributed ; important and lasting elements to': modern civilisation. IN AMERICA FIRST? Even ' the naive earlier teaching acknowledged American sources of a number of important crop plantspotato, corn, -tobacco, beans —and of such drugs 'as. cocaine and commodities like rubber. But now comes the really revolutionary suggestion that the whole: business of agriculture, which is the foundation of all civilisation, may be older" in the Americas than it is in the Old World. As yet, the idea is ho more than a suggestion; those who offer it have not even, called it a formal theory. But it has had the sponsorship of two distinguishedand careful botanists, who are not given to loose speculation, so that it at least rates respectful attention. One of these scientists is Dr. Merle I. Jenkins, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, specialist in the breeding and improvement of corn. Writing on his subject in the Yearbook of Agriculture for 1936, recently off the press, he says: "If we may judge from purely botanical evidence, corn is probably the oldest of cultivated cereals, if not of .all cultivated plants. In its present form it is totally unsuited to exist in the wild. "In order to reach its present condition of apparent helplessness from the standpoint of self-perpetuation, corn must have been grown by human beings ever since it has been enough like the present plant to be classified as corn. The time required for com to reach its present development cannot be estimated with any accuracy, but.it must have taken1 many thousands of years." FOR MANY CENTURIES. For many thousands of years, therefore, there must have been corn-raising farmers in America, for there must be a well-developed agriculture, capable of producing a surplus of food for city dwellers, before there can be any cities. The tremendous pyramids of Mexico, greater than the greatest pyramids of Egypt, were piled up by human muscles that got their strength from corn. Far to the north, the great earthen, pyramids and other monuments which we call Indian mounds were reared by corn-raising tribes, who learned their agriculture from the older and more advanced cultures in the warmer lands of Mexico. And it must have taken a long time for this information to diffuse over such great distances; travel was slow In those days. But corn was not the only indefinitely ancient thing the pre-Columbian Indians had on their farms. Dr. E. D. Merrill, Professor of Botany at Harvard University, called attention to a whole series of other crop plants originated from native American wild sources, in an address at the recent Harvard Tercentenary. He gave, an . impressive catalogue: Corn, potato, sweel. potato, all varieties of field and garden beans, tomato, pepper, sunflower,. Jerusalem artichoke, squash, pumpkin, arrowroot, peanut, tobacco, pineapple, • avocado, and a score of tropical fruits which we North Americans scarcely know even as names. Some of these plants, particularly tobacco and several kinds of beans, are "botanical orphans" like corn; that is, they are known only in cultivation. Their wild ancestral forms have never been found. CHANGED OR LOST. Either these crops have been under cultivation' so long that the ancestral wild species have become ■ extinct; or they have been, changed so much that the wild forms, if existent, are not recognisable as relatives; or the wild forms exist only in some obscure, out-of-the-way spot that, explorers have never discovered. But any of these three alternatives requires a great deal of time for the development of the cultivated forms to their present state, and for their distribution all the way from Patagonia to Canada. Contrast this collection of highly developed "orphan" plants with the cultivated plants *of Europe, Asia, and Africa. ' You are at once confronted with the startling fact that all of the important Old World crop plants—wheat rice, oats, barley, rye, apples, pears, cherries, etc.—have easily recognisable wild-ancestral relatives still living in the old ancestral homes. Plant breeders still go into those lands to study.the wild forms, and to get seed for hybridising purposes. That cannot.be.. done . for the American plants. It constitutes the strongest support for the idea that American agriculture is so old that its wild ancestral species are clear out of the picture. Moreover, this "civilisation" of native American wild plants took place in a few places only—very likely in or near the areas where arose the great Indian empires which the white men found when they came: the Mexican and Andean uplands, and Central America. For the Indians of our more northerly lands used as cultivated plants only the things they had received from the south-west: corn, tobacco, pumpkins, and squashes, beans. They, did not tame a single wild plant native to temperate North America, though laler-coming white men foun.d at least a few of these worth the trouble: the eastern grapes, blueberries, cranberries, and raspberries. Our Indians were satisfied with the "alien" crops. ■ " '■ . i DOMESTIC * ANIMALS. In odd contrast to the ancient Indian farmers' success with plants is his exceedingly limited list of domestic animals. The dog he brought with him when he arrived from Asia as a hunting nomad; and the dog was literally the only importation from the Old World, either animal or. plant. As he established himself, as a settled agriculturist in

the new land, he acquired exactly three domesticated animals: the turkey in Mexico, and the llama and the Muscovy duck in the Peruvian region. This may be due partly to the unsuitability 3f most American animals for domestication. Bison, antelope, deer, elk, bighorn, and similar animals i all existed in the Old World, too; and nowhere in the Old World did prehistoric man ever tame them. They are probably simply unsuited to domestication. y The Indian's ancestors did not find i here the more tractable and domesticable of Old World animals, like cattle, horses', sheep,- swine, poultry. I Professor Merrill stressed the fact' that America's first immigrants were i not farmers. They brought neither seed nor knowledge of farming with them. They were savage hunters, having only their dogs. All their agriculture, which reached such a high state of development, was worked out of their own resources of intelligence, as brought to bear on the food plants which they found here. : First they gathered and ate them as they came upon them in fields and woods; later on they learned how to plant and tend and harvest them, for a more bountiful and dependable supply. And living with them year after year, they slowly improved them, until they had several varieties apiece of tHe more important ones, particularly their one grain, com. THE RIDDLE OF CORN. That riddle of corn's origin continues to interest botanists in: spite of its unsolvability—or perhaps just because of that. There is one wild relative of corn, native to southern Mexico and Central-America,"that persistently gets into their eye; teosinte.. Teosinte is a tall,' rather coarse-stemmed grass with corn-like,leaves and tassels, and cornlike husks around its seed-clusters. But that is as far as it gets. Those seed-clusters *ire as unlike real cornears as you could ■imagine in a halfday's hard trying, and the seeds themselves, angular.and hard and flinty, are utterly ■ unfit to eat. Yet it has been pointed out that the shift of a single mendelian factor would remove that flintiness and make the seeds into tolerably grindable grains. Did some archancestral red-skinned farmer, by a lucky break, find such a soft-seeded teosinte mutant, realise the importance of his discovery, and carry on the line? Another important line of evidence for the real antiquity of American agriculture is the high technical development it had achieved. Though it started from scratch, under the crude hoes and planting-sticks of savages who had to teach themselves everything, it had all the essential elements that mark successful agriculture everywhere: preparation of the soil, destruction of weeds, use. of fertilisers, terracing in steep terrains, irrigation in dry areas, development of special varieties and strains of plants through selective breeding. These things take time, and lots of it