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1 8 Natural History 5/94 



ranean climate, characterized by mild, wet 

 winters and hot, dry summers. The world's 

 other Mediterranean zones are the Cape of 

 South Africa, the central coast of Chile, 

 parts of southern Australia, and my home- 

 land of coastal California. Among those 

 Mediterranean zones, western Eurasia's is 

 not only the largest but may also experi- 

 ence the greatest climatic variation be- 

 tween seasons and years. That climate fa- 

 vored the evolution of annual plants that 

 survived the long, dry summer by putting 

 much of their energy into big, edible 

 seeds, while leaving the inedible remain- 

 der of the plant to die back and regrow 

 each year. Because of the Fertile Cres- 

 cent's extreme Mediterranean climate, its 

 plants provided hungry humans with an 

 exceptionally high percentage of annuals. 



The region also has a high percentage 

 of hermaphroditic, predominantly self- 

 pollinating annuals — that is, ones that usu- 

 ally pollinate themselves but are occasion- 

 ally cross-polhnated. As Zohary and Hopf 

 explain, that feature was also good for the 

 first farmers. Occasional cross-pollination 

 generated several strains to choose from, 

 while the predominant self-pollination in- 

 sured that varieties selected as superior 

 usually perpetuated themselves un- 

 changed and were not immediately lost by 

 hybridization with less desirable strains. 



Some of those big-seeded, self-pollinat- 

 ing annuals, such as the wild ancestors of 

 barley and wheats, were so abundant as 

 wild stands in the Fertile Crescent that 

 they were already being collected by 

 hunter-gatherers before the emergence of 

 farming. Eventually, people began to in- 

 crease their yields of those wild plants by 

 tilling soil, intentionally sowing seeds. 



harvesting, and threshing. That new sys- 

 tem unintentionally transformed the wild 

 plants into cultivated varieties because 

 people naturally preferred to sow, grow, 

 eat, and resow seeds of those particular 

 plant varieties with desirable features. De- 

 pending on the plant species, those fea- 

 tures might include larger seeds, a less bit- 

 ter taste, more uniform germination, and 

 seeds that remain on the parent plant. 



The Fertile Crescent also oiTered other 

 advantages to incipient farmers. Its range 

 of elevations, from the lowest spot on 

 earth (the Dead Sea) to mountains nearly 

 17,000 feet high, meant that within a short 

 distance there was a corresponding range 

 of environments, hence a great diversity of 

 wild plants available for potential domes- 

 tication. These varied environments also 

 harbored many species of large wild mam- 

 mals, some of which were the ancestors of 

 our most important domesticated mam- 

 mals today. Southwest Asia's few large 

 rivers and short coastline provided scant 

 aquatic resources to make the hunter-gath- 

 erer life style competitive with incipient 

 farming. Climatic changes about ten thou- 

 sand years ago at the end of the Pleis- 

 tocene — changes that -exterminated some 

 large mammal species and expanded habi- 

 tats rich in annual plants ancestral to 

 crops — quickly tipped the balance from 

 hunting and gathering to domestication. 



By about 8000 B.C., the peoples of the 

 Fertile Crescent were domesticating nu- 

 merous valuable plants. Most of the calo- 

 ries consumed by those first farmers came 

 from high-carbohydrate cereals such as 

 wheat and barley, the most useful of the 

 dozens of wild cereal species in the area 

 by virtue of their large seeds, abundance, 



