The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind
by Jan Lucassen · 26 Jul 2021 · 869pp · 239,167 words
spread to western parts of Asia and Africa. This is an example of the third domestication phase, which includes local domestications following the arrival of founder crops from elsewhere.26 But the developments in the Fertile Crescent did not stop. Later, olives, almonds, grapes and date palms were introduced, and these products
Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder From the World of Plants
by Jane Goodall · 1 Apr 2013 · 452pp · 135,790 words
for biofuel—although there are signs that this industry is in trouble. Wheat—Triticum spp. I am starting with wheat because it was among the founder crops at the dawn of agriculture—archaeological evidence shows that it was grown on the first-known farms carbon-dated to 9000 BC. And because we
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
by James C. Scott · 21 Aug 2017 · 349pp · 86,224 words
evidence—disputed—of cereal horticulture and livestock rearing. Not in dispute, however, is that between 8,000 and 6,000 BCE, all the so-called “founder crops”—the cereals and legumes: lentils, peas, chickpeas, bitter vetch, and flax (for cloth)—are being planted, though generally on a modest scale. Over the same
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, 212, 213, 231–232 soils deposited by, 124. See also rainfall foodwebs, 22, 41, 48, 59, 89, 90, 108, 113, 255 fossil fuels, 1, 2 “founder crops,” 44 1491 (Mann), xii foxes, 79, 82 Frederik the Great, king of Prussia, 130 fruits, 41, 69, 112 fermentation of, 65 fire and, 17, 38
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow · 18 Oct 2021
topography.26 Farming itself seems to have started in precisely this way, as one of so many ‘niche’ activities or local forms of specialization. The founder crops of early agriculture – among them emmer wheat, einkorn, barley and rye – were not The ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Middle East – Neolithic farmers in a world
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end of the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period) average crop diversity at sites in the Fertile Crescent had dropped from ten or eleven original founder crops to a mere five or six. Interestingly, what followed in this region (during the PPNC period) was a downturn in population, associated with the abandonment
Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies
by Jared M. Diamond · 15 Jul 2005
plants or animals, but where food production depended mainly on crops and animals that were domesticated elsewhere. Those imported domesticates may be thought of as “founder” crops and animals, because they founded local food production. The arrival of founder domesticates enabled local people to become sedentary, and thereby increased the likelihood of
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societies domesticated the poppy, which subsequently spread eastward as a crop. Another area where local domestication appears to have followed the arrival of Southwest Asian founder crops is the Indus Valley region of the Indian subcontinent. The earliest farming communities there in the seventh millennium B.C. utilized wheat, barley, and other
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after the arrival of the Southwest Asian package. In these and other areas where food production depended on the arrival of founder crops from elsewhere, did local hunter-gatherers themselves adopt those founder crops from neighboring farming peoples and thereby become farmers themselves? Or was the founder package instead brought by invading farmers, who
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the whole region ended up with all four species. Agriculture was launched in the Fertile Crescent by the early domestica- tion of eight crops, termed “founder crops” (because they founded agricul- ture in the region and possibly in the world). Those eight founders were the cereals emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, and barley
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locally available wild plants, without hav- ing to wait for the arrival of crops derived from wild plants domesticated elsewhere. Conversely, two of the eight founder crops could not have been domesticated anywhere in the world except in the Fertile Crescent, since they did not occur wild elsewhere. Thanks to this availability
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, and how did the resulting local crop pack- age compare with the Fertile Crescent's founder package? It turns out that the eastern U.S. founder crops were four plants domes- ticated in the period 2500-1500 B.C., a full 6,000 years after wheat and barley domestication in the Fertile
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spinach called goose- foot). But four seed crops and a container fall far short of a complete food production package. For 2,000 years those founder crops served only as minor dietary supplements while eastern U.S. Native Americans continued to depend mainly on wild foods, especially wild mammals and waterbirds, fish
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with which suites of crops and livestock spread, again implying stronger or weaker barriers to their spreading. For instance, while most of Southwest Asia's founder crops and livestock did spread west to Europe and east to the Indus Valley, neither of the Andes' domestic mammals (the llama / alpaca and the guinea
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pointless to domesticate closely related wild pea species that for farmers are virtually equivalent to the already domesticated pea species. All of Southwest Asia's founder crops preempted domestication of any of their close relatives throughout the whole expanse of western Eurasia. In con- trast, the New World presents many cases of
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were independently domesticated? No, that's not the reason. First, many of the Fertile Crescent's founder crops don't even occur in the wild outside Southwest Asia. For instance, none of the eight main founder crops except barley grows wild in Egypt. Egypt's Nile Valley provides an environment similar to the Fertile
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ripe pods of cultivated peas from spontaneously popping open and spilling their peas, as wild pea pods do. Evidently, most of the Fertile Crescent's founder crops were never domesticated again elsewhere after their initial domestication in the Fertile Crescent. Had they been repeatedly domesticated independently, they would exhibit legacies of those
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no further need to gather it from the wild and thereby set it on the path to domestication again. The ancestors of most of the founder crops have wild relatives, in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere, that would also have been suitable for domestication. For example, peas belong to the genus Pisum
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THE EASE of east-west diffusion in Eurasia with the diffi- culties of diffusion along Africa's north-south axis. Most of the Fertile Crescent founder crops reached Egypt very quickly and then spread as far south as the cool highlands of Ethiopia, beyond which they didn't spread. South Africa's
Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time
by James Suzman · 2 Sep 2020 · 909pp · 130,170 words
, like the wild wheat and barley of Anatolia and the indigenous millet in East Asia, almost invited domestication. A characteristic of pretty much all the founder crops, like these that form the basis of our diet today and were domesticated thousands of years ago, is that because they were already high-yielding
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. 20, no. 3, 1967, 197–201. 13Liu et al., ‘Fermented beverage and food storage’. 14A. Arranz-Otaegui, L. González-Carretero, J. Roe and T. Richter, ‘“Founder crops” v. wild plants: Assessing the plant-based diet of the last hunter-gatherers in southwest Asia’, Quaternary Science Reviews 186, 2018, 263–83. 15Wendy S
The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars
by Jo Marchant · 15 Jan 2020 · 544pp · 134,483 words
originate. Biologists have pinpointed this small region, between the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, as the only place where all seven Neolithic founder crops (chickpea, einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, barley, lentil, pea and bitter vetch) grew together, while genetic studies of hundreds of einkorn and emmer wheat strains have