Unexplained Failures in Local Plant Domestication

Key Insight

Some instances of failure to domesticate wild plants are particularly puzzling, especially when the same species was successfully domesticated elsewhere. For example, sorghum was domesticated in Africa’s Sahel zone but not cultivated in southern Africa, despite growing wild there, until Bantu farmers introduced a complete crop package 2000 years ago. Similarly, flax and einkorn wheat, among the first eight crops of the Fertile Crescent and presumably highly domesticable, were not cultivated in their wild ranges in western Europe, North Africa, or the southern Balkans until they arrived as part of the Fertile Crescent's food production system.

The earliest domesticated fruits of the Fertile Crescent—olive, grape, fig, and date palm—also had wild ranges extending far beyond the eastern Mediterranean where they were first domesticated. Yet, peoples in areas like Italy, Spain, North Africa, and Arabia failed to domesticate these evidently easy-to-domesticate fruits themselves, beginning to grow them only after they had been introduced as established crops. These patterns extend to species with close relatives domesticated elsewhere, such as olives in tropical Africa, Asia, and Australia, or apples and grapes in North America, none of which were independently domesticated in their native regions.

This apparent oversight cannot be attributed to a failure to recognize individual plant potential. Plant domestication is not about adopting a single crop in isolation; nomadic hunter-gatherers would not abandon their lifestyle, settle, and cultivate one plant unless a broader suite of domesticable plants and animals made a sedentary, food-producing existence genuinely competitive with hunting and gathering. Therefore, the issue lies not with the specific plant species or the local people's acumen, but with the overall potential of the entire local flora and fauna to support a shift to agriculture.