Author Description

Plant domestication in the Neolithic period, some 10,500 years ago, was a component of the Agricultural Revolution--an immense transformation in human ideology/perception and behavior that changed humanity forever. The Levant is among the world's oldest primary Neolithic domestication centers, and indeed, domesticated Levantine crops (wheat, barley, pea, lentil, chickpea, faba and flax) currently feed billions of people and are indispensable drivers of global economy. In this book the authors unfurl their claims mainly regarding two aspects of plant domestication--the how and the where. They present a unique model pointing out that plant domestication unfolded as a single, rapid, conscious and knowledge-based episode and that it originated in the northern Levant--and more specifically, in southeastern Turkey and the Middle Euphrates of northern Syria. The "core-area one-event" model advanced here is coherent, shows high parsimony, is based on a minimal number of assumptions and is supported by multiple lines of archaeological-cultural, archaeobotanical, geobotanical, agronomic and genetic evidence. Plant domestication and the beginning of agriculture were the starting point of a new state of mind, a new human perception of the natural world, and a full divorce from the primordial hunter-gatherer ethos of sharing and egalitarianism, setting the stage for modern civilizations. Humans became manipulative producers, enslaved by perpetual economic intensification and growth, eventually tracked to specialized and differentiated-ranked societies based on wealth. Many of us believe, in a very modern way of thinking, that we are doomed to endlessly grow, and that a standstill or a retreat are economically and politically disastrous, and may result in a restless world--perhaps leading to the end of modernity as we know it. Notwithstanding the above, the fact that the most basic component of our life here and now--our food--is still, to this very day, based on the uniquely wis