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presented by Dr George Willcox, of the Institut de Prehistoire Orientale Center National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France. He pointed out that cereals have the advantage of being able to be stored; this applies whether they have been domesticated--that is, selectively bred for human requirements--or not. He commented: "Archaeobotanical evidence indicates that wild cereals were exploited in the Near East for several millennia before the appearance of domestic types. Specialized gathering and, especially, storage of cereals and pulses would have provided a secure subsistence base, making possible a sedentary existence. During the second half of the 10th millennium BC there is evidence of wild emmer domestication [emmer is a type of wheat]. However, a millennium after the appearance of domestication, pure wild types still persisted.... [The evidence is] that cereal cultivation of progenitors does not necessarily lead to rapid domestication and that gathering from the wild continued to be practised long after domestication."
The discovery of cultivation, therefore, did not lead directly to settled civilizations. It predated them, perhaps by millennia. Moreover Dr Hole argued that, in some cases, cultivation did not lead to settlement. He bases his argument on research in the area of present-day southwest Iran. There is an enormous geographical gap between this area and the Jordan Valley; between them lies what has been called the Fertile Crescent, yet evidence of early cultivation in the Crescent is relatively sparse. Why should it appear much farther to the east?
According to Dr Hole, a crop-livestock system arrived there as a 'package,' brought by herders who practised transhumance--seasonal migration--between mountains and plains, a routine that would make sense from what we know of the climate at the time. They cultivated emmer wheat and barley
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and may have grown crops for their livestock, not for themselves.
If the origins of agriculture are a little murky, however, the eventual results are clear enough. The Arab conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries AD resulted in an enormous release of biodiversity throughout the region; and by this time, there were ample chroniclers, agriculturalists and others to record the process. From the 10th century onwards we hear of a countryside that had changed significantly since ancient times. Neither were the crops only those with which agriculture had begun. For example, the ninth-century writer Al-Jahiz recorded that there were 360 varieties of dates on sale in the market at Basra; in 1400, Al-Ansari, writing about a small town in North Africa, reported 65 kinds of grapes, 36 kinds of pears, 28 of figs, 16 of apricots and a number of others.
Why did the region which invented agriculture eventually lag behind? In the end, it was damaged by ecologically suicidal and unsustainable deforestation, overgrazing, monoculture and unwise irrigation. Those plants that came looking for manure 10,000 or 12,000 years ago have quite a lot to answer for.
What can we draw from the history of agriculture that will be of use to us today? The Symposium heard evidence that the climate was rather wetter than it is today; given the
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possible climatic changes we face in the next century or two, we should ask whether we face another quantum leap in the way we grow food. Dr Hole quotes the work of Dr Gordon Hillman of the Institute of Archaeology, University College, London, in this regard: the invasion of steppe areas by cereals over 10,000 years ago enormously increased the carrying capacity of the land. Dr Hole does not speculate on any implications that this could have for the future, but arguably one could; if the climate changes are to be reversed, that increase in carrying capacity could be too--with grim consequences for human sustenance.
But that is speculation. A more immediate challenge is that of conserving biodiversity. The morphologically-altered lines of wheat or barley would have lost their capacity to survive in the wild, and would soon have disappeared if untended. (This may be one reason why the earliest domestication of plants is so difficult to date; the evidence has often disappeared.) Likewise, modern selected varieties lack the ability to meet new environmental challenges that was present in their wild progenitors, and that is why a wide range of plant genes must be preserved, not in the gene bank but in the field.
It is also important not to become too heavily dependent on crops that rest on too narrow a genetic base. Two examples of this may be quoted. Coffee originated in Ethiopia, but its use as a beverage was discovered in Arabia only about 500 years ago. A single plant was exported to Amsterdam by Dutch plant explorers in 1706 and this one plant was the origin of Latin American coffee, which thus has a very narrow gene base and is prone to devastating periodic attacks by pests and diseases. Another example is
lentil, which originated in West Asia but found its way to South Asia about 4000
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