

TORREYA 



Vol. 35 March-April, 1935 No. 2 



Where our food plants came from 

 E. D. Merrill 



It is an obvious fact that all cultivated plants and all domes- 

 ticated animals were derived from wild ancestors. The aver- 

 age individual scarcely realizes that agriculture is a very an- 

 cient art, and that every basic plant now cultivated for food, 

 and most of those of minor importance as well, were already in 

 cultivation somewhere in the world at the dawn of recorded 

 history. The same statement applies equally well to our domesti- 

 cated animals for they likewise are very ancient in domestica- 

 tion. The plants and animals domesticated by more or less 

 primitive man, whether in America, or Europe, Asia or Africa 

 were, until comparatively modern times, limited in distribution 

 to either the eastern or the western hemispheres as the case 

 may be. It was not until after the discovery of America in 1492 

 and the voyage of Magellan around the world in 1520 that the 

 interchange of economic plants and animals between the two 

 hemispheres commenced; until that time the cultivated plants 

 originated in North and South America were confined to these 

 two continents, and the same statement holds true for the larger 

 number originated in Eurasia. While primitive man reached 

 practically all parts of the world where conditions were favor- 

 able to his continued existence, he did not, as he advanced in 

 culture, transmit his cultivated plants and domesticated ani- 

 mals beyond the limits of the one hemisphere or the other with 

 very minor exceptions. In other words the Pacific and Atlantic 

 formed a barrier to trans-oceanic communications between 

 America and Eurasia until the close of the fifteenth century. 



The cultivated food plants and domesticated animals form 

 the very basis of agriculture and agriculture is basic to civiliza- 

 tion. While modern man has greatly improved his cultivated 

 plants, increased their yields, and extended their ranges, he has 

 not added a single important one to the long list of species 



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