Diamond's
argument, in brief, is that there were important environmental and geographic factors in North
and South America that inhibited the growth and spread of agriculture. For one thing, Europe and
Asia had a glut of domesticable large mammal species, while almost no such creatures were native
to the Americas. The alpaca is the only large domesticable animal native to North or South
America, and Diamond argues that this was a major hindrance to the development of settled
agriculture. Another factor that inhibited the development of farming societies in the Americas
was the fact that these two continents were much longer on the north-south axis than east-west.
This meant that it was difficult for food production to spread from one area to the next because
of varying climate. As Diamond writes in Chapter Ten:
Imagine a Canadian farmer foolish enough to plant a race of corn adapted to growing
farther south, in Mexico. The unfortunate corn plant, following its Mexico-adapted genetic
program, would prepare to thrust up its shoots in March, only to find itself under 10 feet of
snow.
In other words, it was difficult for the crops that
are amenable to the development of settled agriculture to spread through the Americas. This
meant that despite the abundance of resources, some North American indigenous peoples continued
to live as hunters and gatherers. Significant geographic barriers also existed. The North
American Southeast and Southwest, though on the same latitude, are separated by a dry region
that kept crops from spreading from one region to the next. The same factor made it difficult
for crops to spread from Mesoamerican civilizations to the American Southeast and beyond.
California was almost completely isolated from the rest of the continent due to mountain ranges,
with similar results. Those crops that were transferable, which included some varieties of corn,
beans, and squash, did so only over thousands of years.
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