Movements of population continued to occur until the present. The maps of speech stocks previously presented (Figs. [14], [15]) prove that distant migrations took place after great groups like Athabascan, Algonkin, Uto-Aztecan, Arawak, Tupi, had each lived in compact coherence long enough to establish a well defined language. But so far as these more recent migrations can be traced from speech, they no longer trended prevailingly from north to south and west to east as the first general diffusion must have moved, but shifted in the greatest variety of direction. They are a sort of boiling of the kettle, not a downhill flow. They relieved internal strains and vacillated back and forth with circumstances; they represented no drift like the first occupation. Much of their story may ultimately be worked out and provide a national history of pre-Columbian America. But the effect of these later pressures and expansions and wanderings on the culture development of the New World as a whole is likely to have been relatively slight.
183. Emergence of Middle American Culture: Maize
For perhaps five thousand years little of wide significance happened in America. There may have been progress, but it was slow, and in the long perspective of time its slender evidences are not yet determinable. One can affirm little of this early period except that differences in culture must have begun to develop in conformity with the localized opportunities of environment.
But by the end of the first half of the duration of American antiquity, let us guess somewhere about 3000 B.C., a perceptible differentiation appears to have taken place between the culture of the Middle American[24] highland and the remainder of the Americas. The highland had forged ahead. Especially, perhaps, was this true of the region of southern Mexico and Guatemala. Why it was here that civilization first gathered a notable momentum, it is difficult to say; we are dealing with obscure beginnings at a remote period. An unusual concentration of population is likely to have been an important factor. This in turn may have rested on the ease of existence in a sub-tropical area. Advanced civilizations in general find their greatest opportunities in fairly temperate environment; incipient ones in semi-tropical climates or unforested regions in the tropics. At least there are the parallels of Egypt, Babylonia, India. Possibly the environmental feature of greatest value to cultural progress in Middle America was its diversity. Mountain and coast, temperate highland and hot lowland, humid and arid tracts, tropical jungle and open country, were only a few hours apart. In each locality the population worked out its necessary adaptations, and yet it was near enough others of a different adaptation for them to trade, to depend on one another, to learn. Custom therefore came in contact with custom, invention with invention. The discrepancies, the very competitions, would lead to reconciliations, readaptations, new combinations. Cultural movement and stimulus would normally be greater than in a culturally uniform area.
Be that as it may, Middle America took the lead. It is in the region of southern Mexico that a wild maize grows—teocentli, “divine maize,”[25] the Aztecs called it. From this, in a remote archaic period, the cultivated plant was derived. At least, such seems to be the probability in a somewhat tangled mass of botanical evidence. Here then the dominant plant of American agriculture was evolved: with it, very likely, the cultivated beans and squashes that are generally associated in native farming even in parts remote from Mexico.
Pottery has so nearly the same distribution as maize agriculture, as to suggest a substantially contemporaneous origin, probably at the same center. This is the more likely because the art is of chief value to a sessile people, and farming operates more strongly than any other mode of life to bring about a sedentary condition.
Agriculture almost certainly increased the population. The food supply was greater and more regular; people got used to living near each other where before they had unconsciously drifted apart through distrust; and the proximity in turn, as well as the new stability, would lessen many of the local famines, hostilities, and other hardships to which the smaller and less settled communities had been exposed. As the death rate went down and numbers mounted, specialization of labor would be first made possible, and then almost forced. A self-contained community of a hundred cannot permit much specialization of accomplishment and none of occupation. Every man must be first of all an immediate food getter. On the other hand a community of a million inevitably segregates somewhat into classes, trades, guilds, or castes. The individual with decided tastes and gifts in a particular direction finds his products in enough demand to devote himself largely or wholly to their manufacture. The very size of the community as it were forces him to specialization, and thus diversity, with its train of effects leading to further stimulation, is attained independently of environment.
184. Tobacco
For some culture elements, the evidence of early origin in Middle America is less direct. The use of tobacco, for instance, is as widely spread as agriculture, but is not necessarily as ancient. Its diffusion in the eastern hemisphere has been so rapid (§ [98]) as to make necessary the admission that it might have spread rapidly in the New World also—faster, at any rate, than maize. Moreover, a distinction must be made between the smoking or chewing or snuffing of tobacco and its cultivation. There are some modern tribes—mostly near the margins of the tobacco area—that gather the plant as it grows wild. It is extremely probable that wild tobacco was used for some time before cultivation was attempted. Nevertheless tobacco growing, whenever it may have originated, evidently had its beginning in the northern part of Middle America, either in Mexico or the adjacent Antillean province. It is here that Nicotiana tabacum was raised. The tribes to the north contented themselves with allied species, mostly so inferior from the consumer’s point of view that they have not been taken up by western civilization. These varieties look like peripheral substitutes for the central and original Nicotiana tabacum.
The Colombian and Andean culture-areas used little or no tobacco, but chewed the stimulating coca leaf. This is a case of one of two competing culture traits preventing or perhaps superseding the other, not of tobacco never having reached the Andes. Most of the remainder of South America used tobacco.