One of the large events in the history of humans was when we decided to shun the hunter - collector lifestyle and subside on farms . This event could only have occurred after the great unwashed domesticated crop such as wheat and barleycorn , allowing their early civilization to acquire and brandish .
It now seems , however , that the origin of this domestication process wasmuch earlier than antecedently understand , potentially up to 10,000 class earlier than is mostly accepted , in fact . By trawl through the gene of some of the most common domesticated flora we apply around the world today , including Elmer Reizenstein , wheat , and barley , investigator found evidence that people had been selecting and thus alter the plants up to 30,000 year ago .
“ This field changes the nature of the argumentation about the origins of agriculture , showing that very long - term instinctive processes seem to go to tameness – put us on a equivalence with the natural world , where we have species like ants that have domesticated fungus , for instance,”explainedProfessor Robin Allaby , who co - authored the paper published inPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
It is now well demonstrate that there were a few different centers of crop domestication , depending on what species is being looked at . People in China started cultivating rice , those in the Levant were reap wheat and barley , community in New Guinea were implant sugarcane , while the potato was being domesticated in the Andes . While full domestication and cultivation is believed to have cropped up around 10,000 years ago , it is think that the wild grains of these works were being collect and eaten at least 20,000 years ago .
But this late spell of research is suggest that – for some metal money at least – this figure should be pushed back even further by another 10,000 years . By analyzing evolving cistron frequencies of ancient plant remains uncovered by archaeologists , they have been able to see when a particular cistron that is associated plants continue their seeds , which is , in turn , thought to have been drive by humans selectively gather these potpourri .
It turns out that while for rice this gene appeared just before 13,000 years ago in China , for barley it was present at least 21,000 old age ago and for wheat even further back , pitching up some 25,000 years ago . This , the author debate , show that man was playing some function in the collection , selection , and evolution of plants that long ago .
