Plant Domestication - Table of Dates and Places

By K. Kris Hirst

The domestication of plants is one of the first and most crucial steps in developing a full-fledged, reliable agricultural (Neolithic) economy: to successfully feed a society from a set of plants, you have to be able to control the growing seasons and continuously improve the harvest. The earliest experimentation with plant tending, called horticulture, is much older than the estimates for the domestication histories listed here, traced back into the Mesolithic and perhaps even the Upper Paleolithic of some 20,000 years ago. That is where the true origins of agriculture lie.

What is a Domesticated Plant?

The traditional definition of a domesticated plant is one that has had its wild, native characteristics altered such that it cannot grow and reproduce without human intervention. That process is by no means a one-directional movement. The humans must tend the crops; the crops must produce the best forms.

Today, scientists recognize that domestication is the result of an immensely slow process, hundreds or thousands of years, during which a symbiotic relationship between the plants and humans took place.

This is called co-evolution because during domestication both plants and human behaviors evolved to suit one another.

Co-Evolution

In the simplest form of co-evolution, a human harvests a given plant selectively, based on the preferred characteristics, picking the largest or sweetest fruits, and then uses the seeds from the best fruits to plant the next year. By deliberating caring for a plant, and replanting seeds from what she interprets as the best and most successful plants, she is selecting what properties survive, and which are extinguished.

But scholars have discovered that process is complicated by long-distance trade in seeds, by accidental or purposeful cross-breeding with wild forms, and by experimentation and selection over thousands of years, as both the plants and human behavior intertwine.

Plant Domestication Table

The following table contains links to articles on various domestication histories. Its contents are compiled from a variety of sources, and if you follow the links you will read the latest information about each plant and detailed descriptions of the domesticated plants will be added to as I get to them. Thanks again to Ron Hicks at Ball State University for his suggestions and information.

See the Animal Domestication table for the latest on animals.