232 CHAPTER 10 | The Neolithic Revolution: The Domestication of Plants and Animals
According to evolutionary biologist, geographer, and
all-around theorist Jared Diamond, humans are not the
only species known to domesticate another. Certain ants
native to the American tropics grow fungi in their nests,
and these fungi provide the ants with most of their nutri-
tion. Like human farmers, the ants add manure to stimu-
late fungal growth and eliminate competing weeds, both
mechanically and through use of antibiotic herbicides.^3
The fungi are protected and ensured reproductive suc-
cess while providing the ants with a steady food supply.
In plant–human interactions, domestication ensures
the plants’ reproductive success while providing humans
with food. Selective breeding eliminates thorns, toxins,
and bad-tasting chemical compounds, which in the wild
had served to ensure a plant species’ survival, at the same
time producing larger, tastier edible parts attractive to
humans. Environmentalist Michael Pollan suggests that
domesticated plant species successfully exploit human
desires to out-compete other plant species and considers
“agriculture as something grasses did to people to con-
quer trees.”^4Evidence of Early Plant Domestication
Domesticated plants generally differ from their wild ances-
tors in ways favored by humans, including increased size,
at least of edible parts; reduction or loss of natural means
of seed dispersal; reduction or loss of protective devices
such as husks or distasteful chemical compounds; loss of
delayed seed germination (important to wild plants for
survival in times of drought or other temporarily adverse
conditions); and development of simultaneous ripening of
the seed or fruit.
For example, wild cereals have a very fragile stem,
whereas domesticated ones have a tough stem. Under
natural conditions, plants with fragile stems scatter their
seed for themselves, whereas those with tough stems do
not. When the grain stalks were harvested, their soft stems
would shatter at the touch of sickle or flail, and many of
their seeds would be lost. Inevitably, though unintention-
ally, most of the seeds that people harvested would have
been taken from the tough plants. Early domesticators
probably also tended to select seed from plants having
few husks or none at all—eventually breeding them out—
because husking prior to pounding the grains into meal or
flour required extra labor.
Many of the distinguishing characteristics of domes-
ticated plants can be seen in remains from archaeologicalexists from other parts of the world such as China and Cen-
tral America and the Andes at similar or somewhat younger
dates. The critical point is not which region invented farming
first, but rather the independent but more or less simultane-
ous invention of food production throughout the globe.
Domestication: What Is It?
Domestication is a process whereby humans modify, ei-
ther intentionally or unintentionally, the genetic makeup
of a population of plants or animals, sometimes to the
extent that members of the population are unable to sur-
vive and/or reproduce without human assistance. Domes-
tication is essentially a special case of interdependence
between different species frequently seen in the natural
world, where one species depends on another (that feeds
upon it) for its protection and reproductive success.
Pottery shards were recently discovered along with rice grains and
stone tools at Yuchanyan Cave, located in China’s Hunan Province, by
a team of American, Israeli, and Chinese archaeologists. Bone frag-
ments and charcoal found in association with the pottery allowed sci-
entists to accurately date the pottery to between 17,500 and 18,300
years ago by measuring the fraction of carbon isotopes in these
organic materials. The careful excavation at this site has provided
important evidence that connects pottery making hunter-gatherers,
who inhabited this cave, to the rice farmers that came to inhabit the
nearby Yangzte River basin several thousand years later.
(^3) Diamond, J. (1998). Ants, crops, and history. Science 281, 1974–1975.
(^4) Pollan, M. (2001). The botany of desire: A plant’s-eye view of the world.
New York: Random House.
domestication An evolutionary process whereby humans
modify, either intentionally or unintentionally, the genetic
makeup of a population of plants or animals, sometimes to the
extent that members of the population are unable to survive
and/or reproduce without human assistance.
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