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Seeking Agriculture's Ancient Roots wvi Seeking Agriculture's Ancient Roots As they pinpoint when and where many crops were first domesticated, researchers are painting a new picture of how—and perhaps why— humans began to change their relationship to plants JALES, FRANCE—In his lab in a 12th century from Nevali Cori," he says. So in the earliest fortress that now houses the Archeorient cultivated fields, wild and domesticated research center here, archaeobotanist wheat grew in close proximity. George Willcox pops the top off a plastic The scarred spikelets under Willcox's capsule filled with tiny black particles, microscope represent one simple, physical spills them out into a petri dish, and puts the sign of a very complicated process: the dish under a binocular microscope. Magni- rise of agriculture. Farming was revolu- fied 50 times, the particles leap into focus. tionary in its implications for humanity, They are charred fragments of wheat providing the food surpluses that later spikelets from a 10,500-year-old archaeo- fueled full-blown civilization, with all of logical site in Turkey called Nevali Cori. its blessings and curses. Domestication— Wheat spikelets are attached to the central defined as the physical changes plants stalk of the wheat ear and carry the seeds, undergo as they adapt to human cultiva- or grain, that humans grind into flour. tion—was key to this transformation. It "Look at the scar at the lower end of the allowed former foragers to increasingly spikelet, where it has broken off," Willcox control when, where, and in what quanti- says. The scar is jagged—a hallmark of ties food plants were grown rather than domesticated wheat. It's a sign that the simply depending upon the vagaries of spikelet did not come off easily but nature. And unlike other aspects of early detached only when harvested, so the plant agriculture, such as whether a seed was probably needed human help to disperse its planted or simply gathered by human seeds. "This is the earliest evidence for hands, "domestication is visible" in the domesticated wheat in the world." archaeological record, says archaeologist Willcox spills the contents of a second Timothy Denham of Monash University in capsule into another dish. The scars are Clayton, Australia. round and smooth, showing that these Over the past decade, a string of high- spikelets easily detached and dispersed their profile papers has pinpointed the time and stores of grain. "This is wild wheat, also place of the first domestication of crops, ranging from wheat and maize A decade or so ago, most archaeologists to figs and chili peppers. Now saw the advent of agriculture as an abrupt researchers are beginning to fit break with the hunting-and-gathering all of these into a larger story of lifestyle on which hominids had relied for worldwide plant domestication. millions of years. Researchers thought that At Nevali Cori, where wild domesticated crops appeared very soon and domesticated plants grew after people began to cultivate fields, first in the same fields and perhaps in the Near East as early as 13,000 years even exchanged genes, Willcox ago, then somewhat later in a handful of and colleagues conclude that other regions. full domestication might have But the new data suggest that the road taken thousands of years rather from gathering wild plants to cultivating than the 200 years or fewer that them and finally domesticating them was some archaeobotanists had long and winding (see chart on p. 1835), predicted. "They could not unfolding over many millennia. "If the • i have gone from one kind of agricultural revolution is supposed to be ;iij,.'.'. economy to another in just a evidence for a punctuated change in human few generations," Willcox says cultural evolution, it seems to have taken of the early cultivators. "These quite a long time to get to the punctuation things happened gradually." point," says archaeobiologist Melinda 1830 29 JUNE 2007 VOL 316 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org Published by AAAS NEWSFOCUS Wheat's-eye view. Crop plants adapted slowly to human cultivation, evolving on a time scale of millennia rather than centuries. Zeder of the Smithsonian Institution in has pushed the dates for the first domestica- Wild plants: The long goodbye Washington, DC. Douglas Kennett of the tion of squash and other crops back to about In his writings about evolution, Charles University of Oregon, Eugene, agrees. 10,000 years ago, making the roots of farm- Darwin argued that domestication was a "Agriculture was not a revolution," he says. ing in the New World almost as deep as clear example of selection in action. By cul- "People were messing about with plants for those in the Old World. tivating plants—growing them deliber- a very long time." Moreover, new archaeological work ately—humans intentionally or unintention- Clues to how this slow transition took shows that plants were domesticated ally select certain traits. Today, researchers place are accumulating rapidly. An alliance independently in many parts of the globe. define domestication as the genetically of archaeologists and geneticists armed There is now convincing evidence for at determined physical and physiological with new techniques for probing plant least 10 such "centers of origin," including changes a plant has undergone in response to genomes and analyzing microscopic plant Africa, southern India, and even New human behavior. "Domestication is the remains (see sidebar on p. 1834) has been Guinea (see map on p. 1833). "All around result of genetic changes that have evolved tracing the route to farming in much closer the world, people took this very new step because of cultivation," explains archaeolo- detail. In the Near East, for example, and started cultivating plants," which led to gist Dorian Fuller of the Institute of Archae- researchers are finding that domestication their domestication, says Smithsonian ology at University College London (UCL). itself happened a bit later than had been archaeobotanist Dolores Piperno. The rush These alterations make up what botanists thought, although humans apparently culti- of new data could help eventually solve the call the "domestication syndrome": signs that vated wild cereals for thousands of years puzzle of why agriculture arose in the first plants have adapted to humans and that before plants showed physical changes. place—a riddle archaeologists have been researchers eagerly seek at archaeological Meanwhile, new research in the Americas trying to solve for nearly a century. sites. In cereals such as wheat and barley, the www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 316 29 JUNE 2007 1831 Published by AAAS I NEWS FOCUS syndrome includes the tendency for spikelets in collaboration with Piperno, found micro- across the Near East, as large farming vil- to stay on the stalk until they are harvested, as scopic remains of barley and possibly wheat lages sprung up like mushrooms and people seen in the jaggedly scarred specimens found on a large stone implement. They concluded quickly formed trade and communication at Nevali Cori, pius larger seeds and a thinner that the inhabitants of Ohalo II had ground the networks over the entire region. seed coat that allows easier germination. (It grains to make flour and possibly also baked The notion of a long run-up to domestica- also includes less visible traits, such as simul- dough in one of the ovenlike hearths. tion also gets support from new findings by taneous flowering times.) "Ohalo II is an important warning to Willcox and archaeobotanist Ken-ichi Tanno Once humans began to cultivate plants, archaeologists," Fuller says. "We need to of the Research Institute for Humanity and how long did domestication take? In 1990, abandon some of our long-held assump- Nature in Kyoto, Japan. They examined the pendulum swung toward a rapid sce- tions that as soon as people began to use charred wheat spikelets from four sites of dif- nario after archaeobotanist Gordon Hillman cereals, they would begin to [cultivate and] ferent ages in Syria and Turkey. There was a of UCL and plant biologist Stuart Davies domesticate them." clear trend over nearly 3000 years: Earlier of Cardiff University in Wales plugged More recently, some researchers have sites had fewer domesticated spikelets and data from cultivation experiments into a begun taking a second look at just when later sites had more. At 10,500-year-old computer model. They concluded that domesticated plants first showed up in the Nevali Cori, only about 10% of the spikelets domestication might have occurred within Near East. For decades, excavators had were clearly domesticated, whereas 36% were 200 years and perhaps in as few as 20 to pegged this transformation to an archaeolog- domesticated at 8500-year-old el-Kerkh in 30 years, assuming, as many archaeologists ical period that began about 11,800 years Syria and 64% at 7500-year-old Kosak have, that early farmers used sickles to har- ago and is marked by the first permanently Shamali, also in Syria, Willcox and Tanno vest their crops. Sickles presumably would settled villages. There were a few claims for reported last year in Science (31 March 2006, have strongly selected for spikelets that p. 1886). These results suggest that wild stayed on the stalk until harvest, because varieties were only gradually replaced by those that dropped earlier would be lost and domesticated ones, they say. not replanted. "It was possible to put "Domestication was the culmination of a together a nice story, that agriculture lengthy process in which plants were culti- appeared fairly abruptly," says botanist vated but retained their wild phenotypes," Mark Nesbitt of the Royal Botanic Gardens, says geneticist Terry Brown of the Univer- Kew, in Richmond, U.K. sity of Manchester in the U.K. "Early farm- Before long, however, new data began to ers were receiving the benefits of agriculture raise doubts about this story.
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