Botany · Ch 9 — Plant Breeding
Origin of Agriculture
Origin of Agriculture
The oldest archaeological evidence of agriculture comes from the Fertile Crescent — the region around the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys in present-day West Asia — dating back roughly 12,000 years. This crescent-shaped belt of fertile land, shown in Figure 9.1, stretched from the Nile valley of Egypt through Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) to the Persian Gulf, and is regarded as one of the cradles of settled farming. Long before modern science, early Greek and Roman naturalists such as Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder and Galen had already begun laying the scientific groundwork for understanding how cultivated plants originated …
What this figure shows. A geographic map showing the crescent-shaped Fertile Crescent stretching from the Nile valley of Egypt through Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Mesopotamia (around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers) to the Persian/Arabian Gulf. The map labels surrounding features including the Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, Asia Minor/Turkey, the Syrian and Arabian deserts, Babylon, Sumer, Iran, Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, and Lower Egypt along the Nile, marking this region as the earliest known sit …