Jones, G., Kluyver, T., Preece, C. et al. (6 more authors) (2021) The origins of agriculture: intentions and consequences. Journal of Archaeological Science, 125. 105290. ISSN 0305-4403
Abstract
We synthesise the results of a large programme of plant ecological research to investigate the selective pressures driving crop domestication and the origins of agriculture in western Asia. We explore this primarily through a series of experiments, comparing the ecological characteristics of: (1) domesticated cereal and pulse species with their wild progenitors and (2) the wild progenitor species with other west Asian grasses and legumes that did not become domesticated during the emergence of agriculture. In particular, we consider the balance between deliberate human selection and unintended consequences of human actions in driving the domestication process. Taken together, our results provide the first empirical evidence to suggest that ecological processes, and unintended selection due to competition between growing plants within anthropogenic environments, may have played a more significant part in the emergence of agriculture than previously supposed. Such human-plant co-evolutionary mechanisms would render unnecessary the search for ‘push’ or ‘pull’ factors, dependent on deliberate human invention to solve a problem or to satisfy a need, as prime movers to explain why hunter-gatherers switched to an agricultural way of life.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Journal of Archaeological Science. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
Keywords: | plant domestication; unconscious selection; experiment; ecology; co-evolution |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > Department of Archaeology (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number NATURAL ENVIRONMENT RESEARCH COUNCIL NE/L013266/1 EUROPEAN RESEARCH COUNCIL EOA - 269830 EUROPEAN RESEARCH COUNCIL 339941 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 18 Nov 2020 12:27 |
Last Modified: | 03 Dec 2021 01:38 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.jas.2020.105290 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:167835 |
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