The first shoots of a modern morphometrics approach to the origins of agriculture

Abstract

The transition from a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one of settled agriculture is arguably the most fundamental change in the development of human society (Lev-Yadun et al., 2000). The establishment of agricultural economies, emerging initially in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East (Nesbitt, 2002), required the domestication of crops; ancient plant remains recovered from early farming sites provide direct evidence for this process of domestication. Archaeobotanical remains are typically preserved through charring (partial to complete carbonisation through exposure to heat) and recovered during archaeological excavation (Charles et al., 2015). Seeds of the same species, recovered from different sites and periods, can sometimes be seen to exhibit morphological differences, which may have arisen owing to variations in cultivation practices, climate, soils and altitude, etc. To explore these possibilities, morphological variation in seeds of wheat and barley between archaeological sites was recorded and mapped both in time and space. Results presented here suggest that modern morphometric approaches may help to test some long-debated hypotheses and pave the way for new insights into the evolutionary origins of agriculture in western Asia.