Crop Domestication and Gender j 3535 35
presence of cereal pollen grains is observed at Sultanian sites, coupled with an abundance of
carbonized seeds, including rye, barley, oats, einkorn wheat, and legumes. In addition, there
is a spike in the number of seeds of unwanted weed species, which, as every gardener knows,
quickly colonize any break in the ground cover. Consistent with these signs of cultivation,
archaeologists have also found sickle blades exhibiting the type of abrasions indicative of
harvesting cereal crops. In contrast to the earlier Natufian sickle blades found by Garrod
and others, which showed signs of use for a variety of vegetation,^15 the Sultanian sickles
appear to have been used exclusively for cereals.
The Sultanians of the south thus appear to be the first true agriculturalists, depending
mainly on the cultivation of domesticated plants and animals for their diet.^16 Sultanian
communities greatly expanded the area of land under cultivation and diversified the crops
they grew. As the practice of crop cultivation increased, so too did the populations of the
permanent settlements.
We should not underestimate the profound impact the transition to agriculture had on
the lives of Epipaleolithic people. In addition to the increased labor required, the practice
of agriculture would have disrupted people’s ethical and spiritual ideas about their rela-
tionship to their environment, fundamentally changed their concepts of resource owner-
ship and rights of access, and forced a revision of how work was performed and distributed
within and between groups.^17 The increase in population led to an increase in social com-
plexity and stratification based on the unequal distribution of the world’s first artificially
generated wealth. Thousands of years later, the Greek poet Hesiod imagined that the sexual
union between the grain goddess Demeter and her consort, Iasion, in a thrice- plowed wheat
field resulted in the birth of Plutos, the god of cereal wealth, from which the term “plutoc-
racy” is derived.
For better or for worse, the Agricultural Revolution had begun.Crop Domestication in Time and Space
All wild species exhibit variability within their populations because of mutations that occur
continually in the DNA of their germ cells—sperm and egg. When subjected to natural
selection, the best- adapted individuals will tend to have more progeny than those less well-
adapted, and their descendants will gradually come to dominate the population. In the
course of cultivating wild plant species in the Neolithic period, humans inadvertently accel-
erated the process of evolution by selecting, either intentionally or unintentionally, certain
individuals over others in the population.^18 Although the domestication of animals was
achieved by both artificial selection and breeding, the option of breeding was not available
to early farmers simply because plant sex had not yet been discovered. Plant domestication,
in contrast to animal domestication, was brought about exclusively by artificial selection.
Virtually all of the important crop plants are angiosperms (flowering plants), of which
there are about 235,000 species. Of these, only a few hundred have been more or less domes-
ticated. In fact, 80% of the world’s annual harvest of plant food is derived from only a dozen
plant species: wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, soybean, potato, manioc, sweet potato,
sugar cane, sugar beet, and banana.^19
The dependence of global agriculture on such a small number of species means that agri-
culture initially was restricted to those few areas where the wild relatives of these major