insight review articles Evolution, consequences and future of.pdfVIP

insight review articles Evolution, consequences and future of plant and animal domestication Jared Diamond Department of Physiology, University of California Medical School, Los Angeles, California 90095-1751, USA (e-mail: jdiamond@) Domestication interests us as the most momentous change in Holocene human history. Why did it operate on so few wild species, in so few geographic areas? Why did people adopt it at all, why did they adopt it when they did, and how did it spread? The answers to these questions determined the remaking of the modern world, as farmers spread at the expense of hunter–gatherers and of other farmers. lant and animal domestication is the most accumulate, and unanswered questions have come into important development in the past 13,000 sharper focus. Sources for statements not specifically years of human history. It interests all of us, referenced will generally be found in refs 1–9. scientists and non-scientists alike, because it provides most of our food today, it was P The past of domestication prerequisite to the rise of civilization, and it transformed Our ‘decision’ to domesticate global demography. Because domestication ultimately The question “why farm?” strikes most of us modern yielded agents of conquest (for example, guns, germs and humans as silly. Of course it is better to grow wheat and cows steel) but arose in only a few areas of the world, and in than to forage for roots and snails. But in reality, that per- certain of those areas earlier than in others, the peoples spective is flawed by hindsight. Food production could not who through biogeographic luck first acquired po