Food plants of ancient America / by O.F. Cook.

  • Cook, O. F. (Orator Fuller), 1867-1949.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Food plants of ancient America / by O.F. Cook. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    admitted by ethnologists that the remote ancestors of these races did overrun all the Tropics of the Old World, and the latest investigations warrant the belief that they made their influence felt also along the shores of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, where the civilization of the Mediterranean countries was formerly thought to have originated. It can not be declared impossible, of course, that this primeval migration from America took place at a time when there was more land in the Pacific than now, as Belt and other geologists have held that there was, some thousands of years ago, but such conjectures are rendered gratuitous in view of the highly developed seafaring talents of the inhabitants of the Pacific islands and of the adjacent shares of America, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. It is no farther from America to the inhabited islands of the Pacific than from Tahiti to Hawaii, a route traversed by the Polynesians.® In ancient, as in modern times, the sea was not a barrier, but the most open way of communica¬ tion between distant regions; then, as now, the boat was the easiest means of transportation known to man. In time and labor of travel the islands of the Pacific were far nearer to Peru, for example, than many of the inland regions conquered by the Incas of Cuzco. More¬ over, the Peruvians told the Spaniards of inhabited islands in the Pacific, or at least gave sailing directions which enabled Quiros to reach the Low Archipelago. There was a tradition that one of the Incas had made a voyage of two years in the Pacific and returned with black prisoners of war. Apparently, too, they told the Spaniards that the banana was brought from this quarter, for Acosta gathered from the Indians that it was not a native of America but came from “Ethiopia.” These historical incidents have been overlooked or disregarded, perhaps because such possibilities as an American origin of agriculture and a trans-Pacific dissemination of food plants have not been considered by writers on primitive man. The times, routes, and methods of travel are, of course, questions to be approached by detailed studies of many kinds. For the present purposes it suffices to remember that the actual introduction of plants by human agency discounts in advance all objections on the ground of distances and difficulties of communica¬ tion, and justifies the fullest use of biological or other data in tracing the origin and dissemination of agricultural civilization in the Tropics of both hemispheres. The distribution and the uses of tropical cultivated plants support, it is true, the belief of ethnologists in the truly indigenous character of the peoples, agricultures, and civilizations of the western hemi¬ sphere, but they also testify to a very early colonization of the islands and coasts of the Pacific and Indian oceans from tropical America. «The similarity of Polynesian culture to that of ancient America has been discussed at length in Lang’s Polynesian Nation, Ellis’s Polynesian Researches, and Rutland’s History of the Pacific.