Past and Present Human-Plant Relations in East Africa Indigenous Knowledge, Belief and Practice of Wild Plants in Meru.

Indeed, I am unaware of anyone's even seriously suggesting any supposed distinctive biological features of the region's peoples that might have contributed to the potency of its food production package. Instead, we have seen that the many distinctive features of the Fertile Crescent's climate, environment, wild plants, and animals together provide a convincing explanation. Since the food production packages arising indigenously in New Guinea and in the eastern United States were considerably less potent, might the explanation there lie with the peoples of those areas? Before turning to those regions, however, we must consider two related questions arising in regard to any area of the world where food production never developed independently or else resulted in a less potent package. First, do hunter-gatherers and incipient farmers really know well all locally available wild species and their uses, or might they have overlooked potential ancestors of valuable crops? Second, if they do know their local plants and animals, do they exploit that knowledge to domesticate the most useful available species, or do cultural factors keep them from doing so? As regards the first question, an entire field of science, termed ethnobiol-ogy, studies peoples' knowledge of the wild plants and animals in their environment ...»