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Fertile Cradle Food History

Decent Essays

Somewhere around 9000 B.C.E while the Paleolithic era turned over to the Neolithic era, in the place archeologists call the Fertile Cresent, intentional agriculture began. And Agriculture is the base of all civilization.

But if we stopped at farming and just continued eating whatever we grew randomly, food would be very different today. Watermelons would have barely any of the juicy red inside; bananas would be hard, round and full of seeds; corn would be tiny and not sweet; basically, everything would be worse.

Humans have taken naturally growing plants and improved them for our own gain through selective breeding, Domestication.

Domestication of dogs was over and done, and signs point to domestication of Bottle Gourds a good 1,000 years before anything edible, but domestication of food crops started in the Fertile Cresent, also known as The Cradle of Mankind in 9,000 B.C.E. The Fertile Cresent is made up of the area around the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Those rivers provide water, rare to find in the desert, and the water made the land fertile, great for farming. …show more content…

However, it may be, early on farmers did not selectively breed these plants on purpose, for example, wild wheat: it fell to the ground and shattered when ripe. But a random mutation led to some plants staying on the stem, and those ones got harvested and re-planted more often, again and again, until it overtook the original. But either on purpose or accident, food became bigger, easier to harvest, and

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