And not one large African mammal has ever been satisfactorily domesticated, even now. The entire continent of Africa produced a few scattered plants – coffee, millet, sorghum, groundnut and yams – but these species did not share the same climate so they could not all be grown in the same place. So the groundbreaking farmers of the Fertile Crescent, with their makeshift mattocks, stone sickles and crude pestles and mortars, already had about them the makings of the first ploughman's lunch of bread and butter and cheese and beer the first Mediterranean diet of wine, olive oil, peas and prosciutto and everything for a beefburger except the tomatoes, ketchup and mayo.Īgricultural settlement also began independently in China and Mexico, because these places also had little packages of this and that – rice and soya, maize, beans and squash – from which to construct a cuisine and a culture. And not far away, contentedly chewing on a choice of the other wild grasses and pulses, were wild cattle, sheep and goats all suitable for domestication, and potentially docile swine as well. The seeds of wild wheat were not just big and easy to gather, they delivered the best nourishment. The shuffling of the evolutionary pack dealt the hunter gatherers who happened to be living in eastern Turkey, the Levant and the valley of the Euphrates a whole suite of wild staples, all in that one huge curve of valley, hillside and floodplain: barley and lentils, olives, figs, sweet almonds, chickpeas, mustard and so on. Pretty much the same mutation then occurred in certain wild pulses, which stayed in the pod, as a kind of packed lunch, rather than falling to the soil to multiply.īut it took more than one or two convenient plants that were ripe for the picking to get civilisation off the ground. This accident made them dish of the day for foraging nomads, and then ideal for the first, tentative plantations by the hunters and gatherers who so casually launched human civilisation some time after the end of the last ice age. Instead of spilling their seed upon the ground, these doomed stalks kept their ears pricked, so to speak: their seed heads stayed neatly on the stem, long past ripening. Some individuals in these wild wheat ancestors had developed mutations that boded ill for their evolutionary survival. It had emmer and einkorn, species of grass with heavy seeds. So you start with stone tools and the raw materials for a Welsh rarebit and you end up with galleons, guns and measles, all of which helped 168 Spanish conquistadores in 1532 to overthrow an army of 80,000 Incas half way around the world.īut what was so special about the Fertile Crescent?
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