This question is one of the central concerns of the 1997 book by Jared Diamond entitled Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I suspect your question is referencing this book. So I will basically explain Diamond's answer. The answer is complex, but it is basically rooted in geography. These areas were largely isolated from other areas by deserts or other geographic features (the Sahara, for example) that made it impossible for technologies and crops to...
This question is one of the central concerns of the 1997 book by Jared Diamond entitled Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I suspect your question is referencing this book. So I will basically explain Diamond's answer. The answer is complex, but it is basically rooted in geography. These areas were largely isolated from other areas by deserts or other geographic features (the Sahara, for example) that made it impossible for technologies and crops to spread to them. Also, most of these regions lacked many of the domesticable plants and animals that made agriculture possible. The Americas, for example, were devoid of many of the animals of Eurasia (including horses, chickens, and cattle) that were crucial to agriculture. Grizzly bears and African buffalo, for example, are excellent sources of meat, but cannot be domesticated and herded. Nor can zebras, gazelles, or kangaroos. Diamond also highlights the difficulty of spreading agriculture through continents that are along a north-south axis (like Africa and the Americas) as opposed to an east-west axis (like Eurasia), where similar climates existed in distant regions along the same lines of latitude. In short, these regions lacked the advantages that others had for the independent development of agriculture, and they were isolated geographically from regions that could, a fact that impeded the spread of agricultural technologies, plants, and animals from regions where agriculture did develop.
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