1. Jared Diamond 1999, Guns, Germs & Steel Chapter 8: Apples or Indians?

2. The Fertile Crescent

3. Importance of a ‘crop package’
Many domesticable plants and animals necessary to make a food-producing existence worthwhile
We need to assess the potential of an entire local flora for domestication.
What were the advantages of the native flora and fauna of the Fertile Crescent?

4. Advantage #1
Mediterranean climate (long, hot, dry summers) selects for annuals.
Annuals tend to put their energy into producing big seeds (ready to sprout quickly when the rain comes).
Many of the big seeds are edible by humans (cereals and pulses).
6 of the world’s 12 major crops today are annuals. Annual seeds well adapted to being held in long storage by humans

5. Advantage #2
Crops were already abundant and highly productive in the wild.
“…annual harvests of up to nearly a ton of seeds per hectare can be obtained, yielding 50 kilocalories of food energy for only one kilocalorie of work expended.”
Thus hunter-gatherers were yielding a surplus that they needed to store. To store the surplus they needed to stay in the one place.
Thus, even before domesticating plants, they could easily make one of the major transitions necessary.

6. Advantage #2 continued…
Crops like wheat and barley did not need to evolve to become really useful – they already were.
By contrast, the corn found in America took thousands of years of selective planting to become as big and calorific as it is today.

7. Fertile Crescent Advantage # 3
The reproductive biology of many crops found in the Fertile Crescent were great for farming because they are self-pollinating.
This meant that when farmers located a productive mutant and planted it, the mutant maintained its productive qualities (rather than cross-pollinating with an other less productive species).

8. Fertile Crescent as a Mediterranean zone
Large
High diversity of plants and animal species + high percentage of annual plants = high diversity of annuals
32 of the world’s 56 prize grasses (with big, edible seeds)
Wide range of altitudes and topographies > staggered harvest seasons
Many ancestors of domesticated big mammals: pig; sheep; goat; cow
8 founder crops: 2 wheats; barley; chickpea; pea; lentil; bitter vetch; flax (fiber)

9. Great biological package explains the advent of food production in the Fertile Crescent