Did neolithic man adopt agricultural plants, or did they adopt him? Did agriculture really lead to the first settled societies, or was it the other way around? Or was cultivation actually first practised by nomads? These and other challenging questions were aired recently at an important meeting at ICARDA.

id we adopt the first agricultural plants, or did they seek us out? It could be that certain types of weedy plants gravitated to areas of human settlement because the manure man generated was good for plants. This is, perhaps, discouraging to the human ego--we like to see ourselves as the dominant species. But there was a time when we were not.
     This was just one of many points raised at the International Symposium on the Origins of Agriculture and the Domestication of Crop Plants in the Near East, held at ICARDA's headquarters in May 1997.
     We need to understand the past if we are to manage the future; it is therefore necessary to analyze why man suddenly became sedentary and practised agriculture and    how civilizations evolved. After all, it happened relatively recently. As ICARDA's Director General, Prof. Dr Adel El-Beltagy, remarked in his opening address, 10,000 years is not long in comparison to the 2.5 million years for which man has walked the planet. And that transition had revolutionary consequences--the "emergence of urban
civilizations and finally... man's almost total dependence on very few plants and animals...
It is debatable whether this is a positive devel-

opment."
      Whether it has been positive or not, it began in the West Asia region in which ICARDA is situated. Nikolai Vavilov, the father of research into crop origins, identified the center of origin as such in 1926. Writing in 1976, the distinguished researcher Jack Harlan, to whom the seminar was dedicated (see page 28), and others referred to the Near East as the "center of agricultural innovation" where barley became the first crop to be domesticated; it was followed by wheat. Later, other 'founder crops' such as pea, lentil, vetch, faba bean, flax, tree and vine fruits were domesticated, and the entire system spread out from the area of origin along with the agricultural techniques that had been developed. The system of settled cultivation then moved up the Danube and down the Rhine in one direction, and eastward to Northern India in the other; to the south, it spread across Arabia and Yemen and into the Ethiopian plateau. It reached China in the second half of the second millennium BC.
      But how did it all begin? Our picture of this process has changed a little, thanks to the Symposium. Scientists date settled agriculture

from the earliest appearance of plants such as wheat that have been modified--that is, have been selected to retain their seeds in the head rather than disperse them by head-shattering. The shattering takes place for the dispersal, in the wild, of seeds, but makes cultivation more difficult. The earliest examples of this altered non-shattering morphology, as it is referred to by scientists, are found within a radius of 15 km in the Jordan Valley and date to around 9000 BC.
     But we cannot conclude that this was the dawn of settled civilization. In one of the papers presented at the Symposium, Dr Frank Hole, of the Department of Anthropology, Yale University, pointed out that archaeological evidence may be found of settled sites where no morphologically-changed wheat, barley or rye has been found. He quoted the example of Hallan Çemi in Eastern Anatolia, dating from about 1500 years earlier, where there was no trace of cereals at all; and Jerf el-Ahmar near the Euphrates, from about 9000 BC, where all three were found, but not in domesticated form.
Further evidence for this was in a paper