Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

by Jared Diamond

Fortunately, the Fertile Crescent is by far the most intensively studied and best understood part of the globe as regards the rise of agriculture. For most crops domesticated in or near the Fertile Crescent, the wild plant ancestor has been identified; its close relationship to the crop has been proven by genetic and chromosomal studies; its wild geographic range is known; its changes under domestication have been identified and are often understood at the level of single genes; those changes can be observed in successive layers of the archaeological record; and the approximate place and time of domestication are known. I don’t deny that other areas, notably China, also had advantages as early sites of domestication, but those advantages and the resulting development of crops can be specified in much more detail for the Fertile Crescent.