Wheat domestication (einkorn and emmer)
Domesticación del trigo (escanda y farro)
- Date
- c. 9000 BCE · confidence medium
- Place
- The Karacadağ massif and Çayönü, Diyarbakır, Turkey
- Credited to
- PPNA-PPNB communities of south-east Anatolia
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Selection of ears with a non-brittle rachis, whose grains do not scatter on their own and depend on humans to be sown. Genetics places the origin of einkorn at Karacadağ; emmer was domesticated in the same region.
The process was slow and multi-centred (the southern Levant, the middle Euphrates, south-east Anatolia, the Zagros); hexaploid bread wheat arose later through hybridisation with Aegilops tauschii near the Caspian.
What it led to
- A reliable calorie base for western Eurasia for ten millennia
- Demographic expansion and the migration of farmers towards Europe, Iran and the Indus Valley
- A surplus that supported craftspeople, priests and chiefs
Built on
- Composite flint sicklec. 9500 BCE
- Cereal cultivation (pre-domestication)c. 9400 BCE
- Granary / grain siloc. 9300 BCE
- Pre-domestication cereal cultivation
- Composite flint sickle
- Grain silo
Made possible
- Ard (scratch plough)c. 3800 BCE
- Barley beerc. 3500 BCE
- Industrial dried pasta (Trabia itriyya)1154
- Leavened bread
- Hexaploid bread wheat