Lecture 2: What Early Agriculturalists Ate
In addition, there is the wild ancestor of wheat all over the Fertile
Crescent. Einkorn, spelt, and emmer have a relatively high protein
content, so they can become staple crops. They contain about 8
to 14 percent protein, not nearly as much as meat, but people can
live on it as the base of their diet. It can also be stored. Without
wheat, civilization as we know it would never have developed in
the Fertile Crescent—or, for that matter, anywhere. Rice in Asia, corn in Mesoamerica, potatoes and quinoa in South
America, sorghum in Africa, and teff in Ethiopia were all staple
starches that allowed the population to grow and caused a need for
further organizational rigor. Where there was no such staple, the
population invariably remained small, limited by what could be
gathered, and more advanced civilizations never appeared. In the many places where agriculture never arose in ancient times—
including Australia, the Amazon, and the Kalahari desert—it was
not that these people were somehow less intelligent or savages,Wheat, one of the most important cereal crops, can be grown in a wide variety of
climates and soils.© Design Pics/Thinkstock.