Albert Cipriani

The wild versions of domesticated grasses had seeds too tiny and fragile to harvest, too hard to mill, and their chemical composition rendered them innutritious to humans. Yet we managed to change all that in a mere 5,000 years by the painstakingly slow process of crossbreeding, which was not even discovered until Gregor Mendel a couple hundred years ago.

The facts are that:
1) All of the dozens of domesticated plants known to man appeared from 10,000 to 5,000 years ago.
2) For the past 5,000 years, no plants have been domesticated that are worth a shit (literally).

Ergo, in a mere 5,000 years the following results were achieved:
1) Domestic wheat and oats were elevated from an ancestor with seven chromosomes to their current 42--an expansion by a factor of six.
2) Sugar cane was expanded from a 10-chromosome ancestor to the 80-chromosome monster it is today--a factor of eight.
3) Bananas' and apples' chromosomes were multiplied by factors of two or three.
4) The chromosomes of peanuts, potatoes, tobacco and cotton, among others, were expanded by factors of four.

So how did our primitive crossbreeding forefather farmers do a better job of genetic engineering than us? For example, in 1837 the Botanical Garden in St Petersburg, Russia, began concerted attempts to cultivate wild rye into a new form of domestication. They are still trying, because their rye has lost none of its wild traits, especially the fragility of its stalk and its small grain.

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The information upon which I base this post was drawn from: Nexus Magazine, Volume 9, Number 4 (June-July 2002) PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. The single most damning assertion for evolution is that contained in my first sentence. For if the wild grasses were inedible, how did we ever even get the idea to bother trying to make them MORE edible? -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

RufusAtticus

Well certainly many varieties have been developed in the past 5,000 years, such as grapefruit and seedless oranges. Cotton is also a relatively new domestication. (The cotton that is used for cloth is a recent hybrid of new world and old world genera.)

Potatos have also only been domesticated in the last 2500 years. Sorgum, sunflowers, and peanuts have also been domesticated in the last 5,000 years.

These are simply the result of polyploidization which is a rather easy thing for nature to do, especially in plants.

They had 5000 years, and got first pick.

Well the research into plant domestication suggests that the plants that have been domesticated all share common features that allows them to be domesticated, such as the traits we value being controled by few genes.

Happy Wonderer

Early wild grasses were edible, see popcorn and Hordeum spontaneum. There is evidence that early hunter-gatherers gathered this stuff.

If you were really hungry and had let your grass go to seed, you might consider collecting the grass seeds and trying to eat them. Or you might just call a lawn service and Domino's...

Interesting fact that I'm not sure how to fit into the discussion: many humans have an autoimmune allergic response to gluten (a condition known as Celiac Sprue that affects the gut.) Some are even sensitive to gluten in corn. To me this argues that grasses were added to our diet fairly late in our history.

Gluten intolerance is a real and serious condition. I used to think that it was one of those new-agey health things until a specialist offered it as a possible explanation for my life-long gut problems. (Much money later it turned out not to be, but I learned a lot about the condition and how difficult it is for people who have it -- there is hardly any processed food that you can eat!)



hw

caravelair

don't forget seedless grapes!

Itzpapalotl

This website for a course on plant domestication is fairly good: http://agronomy.ucdavis.edu/gepts/pb143/pb143.htm

particularly relavent is this lecture: http://agronomy.ucdavis.edu/gepts/pb...6/pb143l16.htm

which shows that domestication is controlled by a few genes of major effect and therfore plants are fairly easy to domesticate.

i also have a few plants to add to the post 5000 years ago list:

soybean, Peach, apricot, persimmon, kiwi, banana, hemp, orange, kumquat, litchee, tea, grapefruit, oil palm, Apple, pear, Plum, cherry, Garlic, Onion, Leek and Lettuce.

Coragyps

Bananas and their history came up on this forum a few months ago - and someone gave us the real live history of the modern, triploid, grocery-store domestic banana. Seems to me that it's been invented in the last couple of centuries from manipulating wild species. Similarly, all the cabbage family: Brussels sprouts, kale, cauliflower, kohlrabi...., are from the last millenium or so, IIRC. Now, admittedly, the true worth of kohlrabi is debateable, but domestications seem to be ongoing...

Hardly. Mendel figured out some of the mathematical rules, but breeders had been successfully crossing plants and animals for many centuries before the 1860's.

Duck!

This topic seemed to have been covered pretty well for the layman in Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel".


Duck!

lpetrich

Artificial selection had also been practiced for a long time. In 360 BCE, Plato had recommended that his Republic perform selective breeding of its citizens, in analogy with what one does with domestic animals. (Republic, Book V)

lpetrich

Jared Diamond's book GGS does not go into the details of the genetics of the domestication of animals and plants, though he discusses other important issues, like what features make an animal easily tamable, and the accessibility of various domesticated animals and plants.

Eurasia is oriented east-west, meaning that it has long ecological zones, enabling domestic animals and plants to easily spread along its length. However, the Americas are oriented north-south, meaning that those continents are sliced up by those zones.

Llamas and potatoes were domesticated in the Andes, and they can easily live in ecologically-similar North American areas. But there are tropical areas and deserts in between, which is why they were absent from North America before the recent few centuries.

Which is why European settlers never saw any North American Indians with llamas carrying bags of potatoes.

But those are other subjects, worthy of other threads.

Duck!

From what I remember, you're right lpetrich, he doesn't discuss a lot of the genetics of plant domestication, but I think it's still a good book for the layman like myself for getting the basic details about what plants where domesticated, where they were domesticated and why they were domesticated. And it also discusses why not many plants have been domesticated since the agricultural revolution. Not necessarily a book for the hardcore science or genetics fan though.


Duck!