The Origin and Spread of Domesticated Plants in Southwest Asia, Europe & Mediterranean Basin - Old World Plant Domestication History Book | Perfect for Botany, Archaeology & Anthropology Studies

Glad to be the first Amurikan to review this. It deserves a 5 not because it is great literature but because it is a well written, understandable piece of science on a subject of great interest especially to those who see domesticates close to the wild as superior to later ones. Hide clothed hunter-gatherers were "inventing" something which changed the world beyond all recognition. Was closer to nature somehow better? Think of 9 millennia BCE compared to the world we now live in which has a few hundred years to its credit or a lifetime of 3 score and ten.Published in 1988 this book is half way between the philosopher David Rindos' comprehensive presentation in the 1970s of the ways domestication happened and modern genetics. But I don't think we require that technological sophistication to get a pretty good picture of how domestication happens. There were sufficient if expensive determinants available in 1988 to add to the sophisticated morphology and archeology that identifies earliest evidence of domestication and its spread. The sections on wheat, barley and lentils are excellent as are mysteries of the domestication of fruits and vegetables.I would have loved to have seen some kind of flow chart of first domestication and how domestications spread from their origins. But that would have taken a lot of guess work. How many of the domestication origins were original? It never occurred to me before that selfing might protect domestication against introgression. I also like the morphologic descriptions of divergence among varieties and between domestics and wild forms. Also I was a bit surprised about the early dates of the most ancient domesticates and how slowly domestication must have happened between the 9th millennium BCE (better than the authors' BC) and the 4th. Can we imagine cultural diffusion or was it concurrent selection: everybody's brain discriminations and/or settling happening about the same time. And why the Middle East? Is it merely an artifact of archeological preservation, was the environment more sympathetic to domestication (?) or were Middle Easterners simply more "advanced" hunter-gatherers? A risky thought.I now need to read a more current book to see if cheap DNA analysis has changed the picture greatly or not at all.Charlie Fisher