Events such as war, famine and poor communication explain the slow pace of domestication of crops, says a study by Canadian and U.S. researchers. Agriculture began 10,000 years ago but it took much longer than expected to domestic crops, a key to civilization. When researchers looked into crop genetics, they found that domestication traits are passed faithfully among generations of plants and often more reliably than ancestral traits.
“We conclude that the slow adaptation of domesticated plants by humans was likely due to historical factors that limited technological progress,” said plant agriculture professor Lewis Lukens.
The paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and is available here.