History of Agriculture

The scientific understanding of where and how crop plants originated developed over more than a century of study by different scholars. Alexander von Humboldt (1807) considered the origins of most useful plants to be an 'impenetrable secret'. Darwin (1868) proposed that useful cultivated plants arose through natural selection and hybridisation. De Candolle (1883), in Origin of Cultivated Plants, studied 247 species to trace their ancestral forms, domestication regions and history. The most influential contribution came from Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887–1943), who inventoried the diversity of major cultivated plants using evidence from morphology, anatomy, cytology, genetics and plant geography, and showed that a crop's centre of diversity is usually also its centre of origin. Vavilov first proposed eight geographic centres of origin in 1926, and by 1935 had expanded this to twelve by splitting some centres and adding a new centre in the USA (Figure 9.2 and its accompanying table list the twelve centres and the crops first domesticated in each). Later, Zhukovsky (1968) grouped the world into twelve 'mega gene centres', while Harlan (1971) argued agriculture arose independently in several regions at different times, s …