What are the similarities and differences between the American and Afro-Eurasian agrarian civilizations?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Human society developed independently in the Americas,without any regular or lasting contact with other areasof the world until 1492—an independent experiment inagrarian civilizations to compare with those evolving inAfro-Eurasia. The comparison shows a convergence ofgeneral patterns, with similarities so basic that they bolsterthe conclusion that human cultural evolution has regularitieswherever it occurs. The patterns include more socialcomplexity, more hierarchy, and increasing control ofresources.

Yet some key differences between the Americas andAfro-Eurasia stand out in the comparison. The power ofthe American states to extract tribute, to enforce coercion,and to maintain stability over time never reached that ofthe empire states in Afro-Eurasia. The size of the networksand exchanges, in distance covered and volume carried,never matched that of Afro-Eurasia. Finally, the populationof the Americas, much contested, never reached anythinglike that of Afro-Eurasia. One recent estimate of worldwidepopulation in 1000 CE put North America’s shareof world population at 0.8 percent, with South America’sat 6 percent. The same source estimated Africa’s share at15 percent, with Eurasia’s share at 77 percent. These arestark differences that must have mattered.

Why did people in the Americas create agrarian civilizationson a smaller scale than those in Afro-Eurasia?Humanscolonized the Americas later; they had less time to figure things out. They found no grasses with easilyharvested seeds or large domesticable animals, whoseabsence made both plowing and pastoralism impossible.The change in latitude and climate north and south madesharing and trading more difficult than east–west exchanges,which involved little change in latitude. PerhapsAmericans had a more challenging environment overall.These differences would matter significantly when theencounter between peoples of both hemispheres beganto take place in 1492. But the rapid growth in the scaleand size of agrarian civilizations in the centuries beforethe arrival of the Europeans suggests that eventually,agrarian civilizations would have flourished as they didin Afro-Eurasia, if their evolution had not been cut off byEuropean conquest.