The American Origin of Agriculture

With the exception of the banana, the cultivated plants which were shared with
America by the natives of the islands of the Pacific and of the old world
tropics appear to be of American origin, and the wide distribution of these
plants in the east and the relatively recent domestication of the old world
root crops and cereals accord with the suggestion that the agricultural skill
and compact social organization of a primitive American culture race were
transferred to southern Asia during the movements of conquest and colonization
which spread the Malayo-Polynesian linguistic stock from Hawaii and Easter
Island to Madagascar and southern Arabia, but long anterior to existing
peoples or languages. The cocoanut which affords so direct an intimation of
American origin has already explained the failure of those who have attempted
to demonstrate identity of languages, customs and arts on the two sides of the
Pacific, but also condemns the equally erroneous attitude of others who
refuse, in the absence of such identity, to accept the countless trans-Pacific
similarities as indications of affinity or common origin. The distribution and
uses of the tropical cultivated plants support the belief of ethnologists in
the truly indigenous character of the peoples, agricultures and civilizations
of the new world, but they also testify to a very early colonization of the
islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans from tropical America... If we may
not know where man first began to encourage the growth of the plants which
furnished his food, we are not without numerous indications that agriculture
proper, together with the agricultural organization of human society which lay
behind modern civilization, originated in America and has now completed the
circuit of the globe.