Domestication

Abstract

Because the grasses are common plants, often ecologically dominant and with nutritious seeds, it is not surprising that they were harvested and later domesticated by the earliest agriculturalists. Archaeological evidence shows that wild grasses were used well before agriculture began (Bettinger et al. 2010; Kislev et al. 1992; Purugganan and Fuller 2009), and only gradually did early hunter-gatherer groups shift to farming. Fuller (2007) suggests a model, modified from Harris (1989), that describes gathering of wild food and cultivation of domesticated plants as end-points of a continuum, with intermediate stages of “semi-domestication” that spread over various lengths of time in various crops (e.g., Tanno and Willcox 2006). In general, this model shows that domestication was a long slow process, occurring over hundreds to thousands of years. As population genetic data have been applied more extensively to the question of domestication, and as more archaeological sites have been investigated, it has also become clear that many domesticated species were domesticated more than once (Weiss et al. 2006). The best studied of the cereals are the so-called Big Three – wheat, rice, and maize – plus barley, all of which have an appreciable archaeological record. However, additional data are accumulating on many other species that are somewhat less important for modern agriculture, but that have been important historically and regionally; these data permit some generalizations about the domestication process as well as the effects of selection on genes and genomes.

“… agriculture [is] something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.” (Pollan 2001), p. xxi