298 ESSAYS ON WHEAT 



X. Emmer the Only Possible Prototype of True Wheat 



" The species of grain of the cultivation of which we 

 have the oldest records is emmer. It is true that durum 

 wheat has been found in Egypt in some tombs of the first 

 dynasty that is four thousand years before the Christian 

 era but emmer is found both in far greater abundance 

 and in all of the tombs. It is not at the present time cul- 

 tivated anywhere in Egypt, durum wheat having since 

 historic times taken its place. 



" Emmer has been found in the lake dwellings of 

 Wangen and Robenhausen, which date back to the end 

 of the neolithic epoch, a little before the bronze age. 

 This, therefore, is the only species which has been cul- 

 tivated from the very beginning of civilization, and we are 

 justified in asserting it to be the progenitor of our culti- 

 vated wheats. This explains why it was so desirable to 

 find the wild form." 



Every one will admit that the wild wheat of Palestine 

 possesses all the characters that specialists expected to 

 find in the primitive ancestor or prototype of our cultivated 

 common wheats; but such characters, as Cook has pointed 

 out, might be expected to occur in any wild relative of these 

 wheats. These characters, therefore, do not afford abso- 

 lute proof of the parental position of Triticum hermonis 

 in respect to our cultivated wheats. It is possible that 

 other wild wheats still remain to be discovered in Pales- 

 tine or in neighboring countries which are much less weJl- 

 known botanically, and that one such species may be found 

 to stand still nearer to our cultivated wheats than does 

 Triticum hermonis. Cook ^* has suggested that the real 

 prototype may be a wild species growing somewhere in 

 Arabia or elsewhere in western Asia which has heads with 



1* 0. F. Cook, loc. dt., p. 26. 



