Eurasia and Africa

If the Neolithic revolution had made but fitful progress north of Mexico by 1500, its advance through Eurasia and Africa was nearly complete. Wheat, first domesticated in Southwest Asia well over

10,000 years ago, spread through the Nile Valley and the Mediterranean and eastward to India and China. Rice, domesticated in China much later, diffused throughout Eurasia. These lead crops were followed by others—oats, peas, olives, grapes, almonds, barley, oranges, lentils, and millet. Several thousand years later, farmers in Africa domesticated sorghum, palm oil, and yams.

The animals of Eurasia were as diverse as its crops. While few large mammals in the Americas survived the Clovis era, the ancient peoples of Eurasia learned how to domesticate horses, pigs, cows, goats, sheep, and oxen. In addition to protein-rich meat, cows and goats provided milk and dairy products such as cheese that could be stored for winter; horses and oxen dragged trees and boulders from fields, pulled ploughs through tough sod, and contributed manure for fertilizer. Eurasians greatly increased the power of oxen and horses by harnessing them to wheeled vehicles. Because of the diversity and nutritional value of its food sources, the Eurasian population increased rapidly.

To accommodate the growing demand for food, Eurasian farmers cut down forests, filled in marshlands, and terraced hillsides. Monarchs joined with merchants and bankers to build port facilities, canals, and fleets of ships to ensure the food supply to urban centers.

Cereal crops and animals dispersed throughout the vast Eurasian landmass, but so did new diseases. New strains of viruses and bacteria appeared in cows, pigs, goats, and sheep and readily spread to the humans who kept them. Diseases also proliferated in cities, whose sanitation facilities were poor. Recurrent plagues swept across Eurasia. But those who survived acquired biological resistance.

West Africa evolved differently. The grassy savannah just south of the Sahara became the home

Population of Major Civilizations of Europe, Asia, and Africa, AD 1500 In 1500, most of the people of the "Old World”—Europe, Asia, and Africa—belonged to one of five major civilizations. Of these, the most populous was China under the Ming Dynasty, with about 140 million people, and then the Islamic world, with over 100 million. The fractious nations of western Europe, though less populous, had mastered formidable new technologies of warfare.

For mostly herding peoples. Cities emerged in response to the growth of trans-Sahara trade: Finished goods, including cloth from North Africa, were traded for gold, salt, kola (a caffeine rich nut), and slaves. Warlords commanding horse-mounted troops vied for the control of the trade routes, and eventually founded the great kingdoms of Mali, and Songhay. By AD 1500, Timbuktu had become a major city, home to an important Islamic university and library.

Seldom did pastoral and trading empires penetrate far into the tropical regions farther south. The religion of Islam, which had spread through the grasslands south of the Sahara, also made less progress among Africans on the tropical coast. There the tsetse fly, carrier of sleeping sickness, decimated horse and cattle herds. Malaria, too, discouraged potential invaders.

The village was the main unit of social organization of sub-Saharan Africa. Some villages merged into far-flung kinship networks and even small kingdoms, such as Benin and Congo. Relatively insulated from the imperial struggles farther north, these Africans mostly kept to themselves, growing crops and harvesting the lush vegetation of the forest. By 1500, the lives of these people, too, were about to change.

By 1500 China, with a population of 100-150 million people, had literally walled itself away from “barbarians” elsewhere in Asia; its own kingdom was effectively ruled by a highly-educated class of bureaucrats steeped in the principles of Confucianism. The

These Arab and Ottoman scholars, in the late 1500s, are using astronomical tools to devise a better globe of the world, shown in the foreground.

This depicts a scene of a city on the Yellow River in northern China around 1500. Chinese cities were generally cleaner, with better water supplies and sewage disposal, than their European counterparts.

Islamic world was nearly as populous, but stretched across three continents, ranging from the North Africa and eastern Europe through Arabia, Persia, and northern India with outposts in Southeast Asia. Unlike China, it was divided into many different empires.

The Image Clovis Points at myhistorylab. com