The Fertile Crescent: Where Wheat and Barley Were First Domesticated
The Fertile Crescent: Where Wheat and Barley Were First Domesticated Around 12,000 years ago, in the hill country between what is now Turkey, Syria,...
Around 12,000 years ago, in the hill country between what is now Turkey, Syria, and the Levant, people began doing something different with grain.
They had been harvesting wild grasses for a long time — using stone tools to cut the stalks, using grinding stones to process the seed. The wild ancestors of wheat and barley were already growing across the region, dense enough in places to harvest in quantity. Bands of people moved through the landscape seasonally, arriving at the dense wild stands when the grain was ready.
What changed, gradually and in many places at once, was that some of those people began staying. They planted seed near their camps. They returned to the same places season after season. They began, in the most tentative and incremental way, to make choices about which seed went back into the ground.
That is where agriculture began.
The Grasses...
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