In addition, as Diamond himself points out, China and India
benefited greatly from very rich suites of animals and
plants, and from the orientation of Eurasia. But most of the
poor people of the world today are in those two countries.
In fact, the best way to see the scope of Diamond’s
thesis is in terms of his own explanatory variables. Map 4
shows data on the distribution of Sus scrofa , the ancestor
of the modern pig, and the aurochs, ancestor of the modern
cow. Both species were widely distributed throughout
Eurasia and even North Africa. Map 5 (this page) shows
the distribution of some of the wild ancestors of modern
domesticated crops, such as Oryza sativa , the ancestor of
Asian cultivated rice, and the ancestors of modern wheat
and barley. It demonstrates that the wild ancestor of rice
was distributed widely across south and southeast Asia,
while the ancestors of barley and wheat were distributed
along a long arc from the Levant, reaching through Iran and
into Afghanistan and the cluster of “stans” (Turkmenistan,
Tajikistan, and Krgyzistan). These ancestral species are
present in much of Eurasia. But their wide distribution
suggests that inequality within Eurasia cannot be explained
by a theory based on the incidence of the species.
The geography hypothesis is not only unhelpful for
explaining the origins of prosperity throughout history, and
mostly incorrect in its emphasis, but also unable to account
for the lay of the land we started this chapter with. One
might argue that any persistent pattern, such as the
hierarchy of incomes within the Americas or the sharp and
long-ranging differences between Europe and the Middle
East, can be explained by unchanging geography. But this
is not so. We have already seen that the patterns within the
Americas are highly unlikely to have been driven by
geographical factors. Before 1492 it was the civilizations in
the central valley of Mexico, Central America, and the
Andes that had superior technology and living standards to
North America or places such as Argentina and Chile.
While the geography stayed the same, the institutions
imposed by European colonists created a “reversal of
fortune.” Geography is also unlikely to explain the poverty of
the Middle East for similar reasons. After all, the Middle
East led the world in the Neolithic Revolution, and the first
towns developed in modern Iraq. Iron was first smelted in