Page 325 - The Tigris Expedition

In the Indus Valley in Search of Meluhha
clothing also described as identical on both sides of
This is not all. Of recent years botanists have ^ somet g
add. A modern chromosome study has shown t a -
something very special about the cotton cultivate y
peoples of Mexico and Peru; it was not at all the same species
grew wild in America and which in fact did not produce spinnable
lint. The chromosomes of all Old World cottons were di erent
from those of the wild American species, and the pre-Columbian
cotton domesticators in Mexico and Peru had somehow obtained
the Old World cotton, crossed it with the wild local cotton and
obtained a perfectly spinnable product that had the chromosomes
of both species combined in a hybrid with double chromosome
number, the only species with both types of chromosomes corn-
bined. The botanists now leave the question open for the students of
human culture to answer: how did the spinnable Old World cotton,
the one with the chromosomes of the species first cultivated by the
Indus people, get into the hands of the culture-founders of Mexico
and Peru? If seeds had been carried by the wind or by birds, an
American Indian must have recognised them for what they were
and planted them in his fields before any plants had time to grow
wild, and with the idea that if the lint grew longer than that of wild
cotton he could invent the spinning wheel to make yarn, and the
loom to work yarn into cloth.
There is something amusing about the desperate desire of so
many historians and anthropologists to reserve the first possible
crossings of the Atlantic to the Spaniards and the Vikings. That is,
to the Europeans who only reached the Canary Islands two
thousand years after the Phoenicians who got there from Asia
Minor on successive voyages of exploration and colonisation.
There is almost a touch of religious fanaticism in the attempts by the
western world to see America as a European creation, completely
protected by sea until the local barbarians were found by civilised
Christian pioneers. We should try to be more open-minded. The art
of navigation, literacy, even the symbol of the cross and the religion
we carried to America, we had first obtained from Asia.
With our heads bursting with historic data and new impressions,
with a photographic harvest of the most spectacular Arab forts any
of us had ever seen, and with Sani tempting us untiringly to visit
ever more mosques and Moslem marvels, we suddenly found
ourselves squeezed barefoot and exhausted in amongst the packed
crowds of another historic sanctuary. To the sound of drums and
the smell of incense he elbowed us in for a glimpse of a sacred coffin,

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