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CHAPTER IV 
FOOD RESOURCES 
The basis of all modern civilization rests on agTiculture, especially 
the cultivation of cereals, for without wheat, or a substitute cereal, 
the vast majority of the human race would perish within a few weeks. 
Old World archaeologists have traced back the cradle of civilization 
to two great river valleys, the Nile and the Euphrates, one or other 
of which saw the first domestication of wheat and barley four or five 
millenia before the Christian era. The Old World, for some reason 
not at present understood, possessed a greater wealth of seed grasses 
than the New; it gave man not only wheat and barley, but oats, rye, 
millet, and rice. The only cereals indigenous to America were maize 
and wild rice (Zizania sp.). The latter was never domesticated, 
although the Indians used it extensively for food; but long before 
the Christian era maize had become the staff of life for numerous 
tribes living in the southern parts of North America, and was slowly 
spreading northward. We do not know when it reached Canada, 
nor how, except that it was probably introduced by Iroquoian tribes 
moving northeastward out of the valley of the Ohio river. In 
Cartier’s time offshoots from these tribes occupied the broad penin- 
sula between lakes Huron, Ontario, and Erie, together with a narrow 
fringe of land along the St. Lawrence river as far east as Quebec; 
and the cultivation of maize had spread from them to some adjacent 
Algonkian tribes, the Alalecite of Quebec south of the St. Lawrence, 
some Algonkins on the Ottawa river, the Ottawa of Georgian bay, and 
the Missisauga on the north shore of lake Huron. Further extension 
northward was not possible, for although maize can be grown for 
fodder within the highlands of Ontario and Quebec, no variety that 
man has yet produced will ripen sufficiently for grain. Modern 
methods of cultivating it, indeed, hardly differ from the original 
Indian method, and some of our best known varieties were grown 
in America centuries before the coming of the white man. 
Although the Iroquoian tribes subsisted very largely on maize, 
they raised also beans and squashes, the latter in sejiarate gardens, 
but the beans in the maize fields, where the long grain-stalks sup- 
