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Bar- Yosef, O. (2011), The origins of agriculture: New data, new ideas. Current Anthropology
52(S4):S163– S174.- In Genesis, Eve is represented as a gatherer: she picks the fruit. This passage also seems to
reflect the well- established idea that women, as the primary gatherers of plant products, were
responsible for initiating the “curse” of farming for a living. - The outer cell wall of pollen grains is composed of sporopollenin, one of the most inert
of all biological polymers. For this reason, pollen is often preserved in soils and sediments and
provides useful archeological markers for palynologists. - Bar- Yosef, O. (2011), Climatic fluctuations and early farming in West and East Asia.
Current Anthropology 52(S4):S175– S193. - Bar- Yosef, The origins of sedentism and agriculture in Western Asia.
- Bar- Yosef, The origins of agriculture.
- Zeder, Melinda A. (2011), The origins of agriculture in the Near East. Current Anthropology
52(S4):S221– S235. - Unger- Hamilton, The Epi- Palaeolithic of southern Levant and the origins of cultivation.
- Bar- Yosef, Climatic fluctuations and early farming in West and East Asia.
- Hillman, G. C., R. Hedges, A. Moore, S. Colledge, and P. Pettitt (2001), New evidence of
late glacial cereal cultivation at Abu Hureyra on the Euphrates. Holocene 11(4):383– 393. - New insights gained from the field of evolutionary ecology have now pushed the beginning
of crop domestication even further back in time. Even before the planting of the first gardens,
foragers were already manipulating and modifying their local environments in ways that increased
the abundance of desirable species and reduced the abundance of undesirable species. By doing so,
they also may unconsciously have been selecting for certain invisible, genetically determined, phys-
iological traits, such as rapid seed germination. Therefore, the true beginnings of plant “domestica-
tion” may stretch as far back as the Late Glacial Maximum, around 23,000 bp, even though the first
visible (morphological) signs of plant domestication don’t appear in the archaeological record until
the early Pre- Pottery Neolithic B. See Zeder, The origins of agriculture in the Near East. - Diamond, J. (1999), Guns, Germs, and Steel. W. W. Norton, p. 132.
- Einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum) is derived from wild einkorn (T. boeoticum), which
is abundant throughout the Near East. Emmer wheat (T. turgidum) evolved from a wild rela-
tive, T. dicoccoides. See Feuillet, C., P. Langridge, and R. Waugh (2007), Cereal breeding takes
a walk on the wild side. Trends in Genetics 24:24– 32; Salamini, F., H. Özkan, A. Brandolini, R.
Schäfer- Pregl, and W. Martin (2002), Genetics and geography of wild cereal domestication in
the Near East. Nature Genetics 3:429– 441. - Zeder, The origins of agriculture in the Near East.
- Tanno, K., and G. Willcox (2006), How fast was wild wheat domesticated? Science
311:1886. - Recent studies indicate that domestication of barley with tough rachises involved the arti-
ficial selection of mutations in two adjacent genes, named btr1 and btr2. The btr1- type muta-
tion was selected for in the Southern Levant, whereas the btr2- type mutation appears to have
occurred subsequently in the Northern Levant. See Pourkheirandish et al. (2015), Evolution of
the grain dispersal system in barley. Cell 162: 527– 539. - Cauvin, J. (2000), The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, Trans. Trevor
Watkins. Cambridge University Press.