The final section of the article turns archaeology toward the future.
This is perhaps its most important message.
Studying ancient agriculture is not merely about discovering where wheat came from.
The archaeological record represents thousands of years of experiments in agricultural resilience.
And many of those experiments have been forgotten.
Diversity repeatedly rises and falls
Early domestication often incorporated variation from multiple populations.
But isolation can gradually erode that diversity.
The same process occurs at the level of farming systems.
Agricultural communities once cultivated many crop combinations that later disappeared.
Some species became marginal crops.
Others vanished from large parts of their former ranges.
A crop can go from important to nearly invisible
The paper highlights Triticum timopheevi.
This wheat was once cultivated across a large region.
Archaeological evidence places it in parts of Turkey before 6000 BC.
It eventually spread from central Europe toward Turkmenistan.
Yet during later periods its range contracted dramatically.
By the twentieth century it had become largely associated with Georgia.
The crop did not cease being biologically viable.
Agricultural history moved around it.
“Orphan crops” are evolutionary libraries
Many under-studied crops may contain useful characteristics:
drought tolerance,
disease resistance,
adaptation to poor soils,
nutritional qualities,
unusual perennial growth,
or compatibility with local farming systems.
Modern agriculture is heavily concentrated around a relatively small number of globally dominant crops.
That concentration creates efficiency, but also vulnerability.
A changing climate makes those vulnerabilities harder to ignore.
Archaeology can become agricultural research
Usually we imagine modern agricultural science helping us understand ancient farming.
The authors propose reversing the direction.
Ancient agriculture can help us imagine future agricultural systems.
Archaeobotany tells us which crops survived particular climatic fluctuations.
Genomics reveals where ancient populations acquired new genetic diversity.
Archaeology documents agricultural systems that persisted for centuries or millennia.
Historical crop distributions reveal species that were once important but later abandoned.
Together, these records form a gigantic natural experiment conducted across thousands of years.
The final lesson
The history of domestication is not a story of humans progressively perfecting a few plants.
It is a history of experimentation, hybridisation, ecological engineering, accidental selection, migration, loss and renewal.
Agricultural diversity has repeatedly contracted.
But it has also repeatedly been rebuilt when people moved crops, exchanged seeds and brought previously separated populations together.
The future of agriculture may therefore depend partly on recovering something that the past possessed in abundance:
options. 🌾
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Further reading: This post is inspired by and draws on Dorian Q. Fuller, Tim Denham, and Robin Allaby, “Plant domestication and agricultural ecologies,” Current Biology 33, no. 11 (2023): R636–R649, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2023.04.038. Read the original article in Current Biology
For a classic and highly readable perspective on why plant domestication arose in some regions but not others, see Jared Diamond, Chapter 8, “Apples or Indians: Why Did Peoples of Some Regions Fail to Domesticate Plants?”, in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W. W. Norton, 1997), pp. 131–156. Read “Apples or Indians” View Guns, Germs, and Steel on Google Books
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