Man as a Maker of New Plants and New 

 Plant Communities 1 



By Edgar Anderson 



Curator of Useful Plants, Missouri Botanical Garden 



Engelmann Professor of Botany, Washington University 



St. Louis, Mo. 



That man changes the face of nature may be noted by any casual 

 observer; not even the ablest and most experienced scholar can yet 

 estimate just how far this has reclothed the world. Whole landscapes 

 are now occupied by man-dominated (and in part by man-created) 

 faunas and floras. This process began so long ago (its beginnings 

 being certainly as old as Homo sapiens) and has produced results of 

 such complexity that its accurate interpretation must await research 

 as yet scarcely begun. Though answers to many basic questions re- 

 main unknown, they are by no means unknowable. 



The average thoughtful person has little inkling of this reclothing 

 of the world; even professional biologists have been tardy in recog- 

 nizing that in the last analysis a significant portion of the plants and 

 animals which accompany man is directly or indirectly of his own 

 making. The ordinary American supposes that Kentucky bluegrass 

 is native to Kentucky and Canada bluegrass native to Canada. A 

 few historians and biologists know that these grasses (along with much 

 of our meadow and pasture vegetation) came to us from Europe. The 

 research scholar inquiring critically into the question realizes that- 

 some of this vegetation was as much a Neolithic immigration into 

 Europe as it was a later immigration into the New World. Like Ken- 

 tucky mountaineers, this vegetation has its ultimate roots in Asia, and 

 spread into central and western Europe at times which, biologically 

 speaking, were not very long ago. 



It is obvious that landscapes such as the American Corn Belt have 

 been transformed by man. Other man-dominated landscapes do not 



1 Reprinted by permission from Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, 

 published and copyrighted by the University of Chicago Press for the Wenner- 

 Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 195G. 



461 



