Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/M010805/1
Are models for the origins of agriculture in southwest Asia based on a misunderstanding of the relationship between wild and domesticated wheat?
Grant Award
- Principal Investigator:
- Professor TA Brown, The University of Manchester, Earth Atmospheric and Env Sciences
- Grant held at:
- The University of Manchester, Earth Atmospheric and Env Sciences
- Science Area:
- Terrestrial
- Overall Classification:
- Panel E
- ENRIs:
- Biodiversity
- Natural Resource Management
- Science Topics:
- Cereals
- Crop science
- Science-Based Archaeology
- Population Ecology
- Environmental Genomics
- Abstract:
- Agriculture is thought to have begun about 10,000 years ago in the 'Fertile Crescent', a region of southwest Asia comprising the plains of Mesopotamia, Syria, Israel, Jordan and Palestine, and some of the mountainous areas to the east of Anatolia. The beginning of agriculture was one of the most important events in the human past, being the first occasion on which humans broke free from the limits imposed by the environment and learnt how to shape the environment to their own ends. Agriculture also had far reaching effects on human society, eventually resulting in rapid population growth and the development of complex civilizations such as those of Classical Greece and Rome. Much research has been devoted to understanding the origins of agriculture but many questions remain unanswered. One of the most important of these is whether the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture was a rapid or a gradual process. Initially, views on this topic were influenced by experimental studies which showed that if appropriate husbandry practices were applied, then the period required for a wild cereal to undergo the genetic changes associated with domestication might be as short as a few decades. The attractive idea that a single group of enlightened people could have been responsible for the domestication of one or more staple crops within a few human generations was supported by the first comprehensive genetic comparison of wild and cultivated cereals, which was interpreted as indicating a rapid domestication of einkorn wheat in the Karaca Dag region of southeast Turkey. Other genetic studies supported the idea that cereals were domesticated rapidly, but disagreed about exactly where the process took place for individual crops. Archaeological research, on the other hand, has given conflicting evidence suggesting that cereal domestication was a protracted process that took several millennia to complete. So why do different genetic analyses of a single crop give inconsistent results, and why do none of these results agree with the archaeological evidence? One possible, unrecognised factor that might be complicating the genetic studies is that domesticated crops have a reticulate rather than linear relationship with their wild progenitor populations. A linear relationship is where the crop is descended directly from a wild population, whereas reticulation arises when there is cross-hybridization between the crop and various wild populations from which it is not directly descended. We have obtained preliminary evidence that the relationship between wild and domesticated emmer wheat is indeed reticulated. In this new project we plan to obtain more comprehensive genetic data to see if this is in fact the case. The project is important because current models for the origins of agriculture, whether based on genetics or archaeology, tend to assume that the relationship between wild plants and the crop is linear. Demonstrating that the relationship is more complex will therefore change our way of thinking about early agriculture, broadening the range of models that could be considered. One of these new models would be the interesting possibility that early farmers collected wild emmer wheat from different parts of the Fertile Crescent, the most useful features of these different wild plants becoming combined in the crop.
- NERC Reference:
- NE/M010805/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- Standard Grant FEC
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- Standard Grant
This grant award has a total value of £254,429
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| DI - Other Costs | Indirect - Indirect Costs | DA - Investigators | DI - Staff | DA - Estate Costs | DA - Other Directly Allocated | DI - T&S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £33,637 | £66,414 | £32,612 | £87,972 | £25,982 | £2,711 | £5,101 |
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