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ing techniques, milking, fruit trees, and 

 beer and wine production. 



Why did the same plant package launch 

 food production throughout western Eura- 

 sia? Was the same set of wild plants found 

 useful in many areas and independently 

 domesticated? No, that's not the case. 

 Many of the Fertile Crescent's "founder 

 crops" (to use Zohary's and Hopf's term) 

 don't even occur in the wild outside South- 

 west Asia. In Egypt, for instance, of the 



eight main founder crops, only barley 

 grows wild. Egypt's NUe Valley provides 

 an environment similar to that of the Tigris 

 and Euphrates Valley, so the package that 

 worked well in Mesopotamia also worked 

 well enough in the Nile Valley to trigger 

 the spectacular rise of indigenous Egyp- 

 tian civihzation. The Sphinx and the pyra- 

 mids, then, were built by people fed on 

 crops originating in the Fertile Crescent, 

 not in Egypt. 



Wild ancestors of crops that were first 

 domesticated in Southwest Asia also ex- 

 isted in Europe, Asia, and India, but we 

 can be confident that the crops first pro- 

 duced there were mostly obtained from 

 Southwest Asia and were not local domes- 

 ticates. All modem cultivated varieties of 

 most of the Fertile Crescent's founding 

 crops either share only one arrangement of 

 chromosomes out of multiple arrange- 

 ments found in the wild ancestor, or else 

 they share only a single mutation (out of 

 many possible mutations) by which the 

 cultivated varieties differ from the wild an- 

 cestor in characteristics desirable to hu- 

 mans. For instance, all cultivated peas 

 share the same recessive gene that pre- 

 vents ripe pods from spontaneously pop- 

 ping open and spilUng their peas, as wild 

 pea pods do. Evidently, most of the Fertile 

 Crescent's founder crops were never do- 

 mesticated again elsewhere after their ini- 

 tial domestication. Had they been repeat- 

 edly domesticated independently, they 

 would exhibit legacies of those multiple 

 origins in the form of varied chromosomal 

 arrangements or varied mutations. 



The ancestors of most of the founder 

 crops have multiple wild relatives, in the 

 Fertile Crescent and elsewhere, that would 

 also have been suitable for domestication. 



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© 1993 CIBA Consumer Pharmaceuticals 

 20 Natural History 5/94 



