The history of food is quite simple in broad strokes. After 200,000 years living on berries from the forest, clams from the beach and the occasional wild boar for big occasions, modern humanity invented agriculture 12,000 years ago – the origin of the Neolithic – and with it the first settlements, the division of labor and a unusual population growth, then armies and officials, the first cities, writing and mathematics, civilization as we know it.
All this not only happened in the Middle East, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, but also in China and South America, perhaps not simultaneously, but independently. The end of the last ice age was the critical factor that enabled agriculture by clearing vast fertile lands that until then had been buried under thick layers of ice. If there is a dazzling example of the effect of the environment in the history of the human species, it is none other than the origin of the Neolithic. A change in the average temperature of the planet that literally ignited the spark of agriculture and therefore of civilization. That is the story of food.
But genomics insists on presenting us with a deep history of food as well, one in which its domestication seems to have begun long before our species had anything to do with it, or even existed at all. One of the first domesticated foods was the fig, as we know from a small box in which a dozen of these fruits had been neatly placed, almost as if they were gift-wrapped, and whose fossilized or mummified remains appeared in an Israeli excavation dating back more than 12,000 years ago.
A fig – for those who like it – looks like a high-tech agricultural product, and few people would have bet on it as the most primitive of the foods domesticated by humanity. The same scientists who found the box, however, also found an explanation for the phenomenon. The wild fig tree, which bears dwarf fruits very much to the taste of bees, spontaneously generates jumbo-sized mutant figs. Only once in a while, on some stray branch of some unlikely tree, but surely that was enough for an agricultural pioneer to take the giant fruit and use it to reproduce the wonder. That requires talent, but this time we have to thank the support of mother nature. Yes, the same one that generates tsunamis and AIDS viruses.
Genomics insists on presenting us with a profound history of food, one in which its domestication seems to have begun long before our species had anything to do with it.
Bears also helped domesticate the apple long before we were around. This fruit comes from a tiny berry native to East Asia, and it was the bears that spread it to the west of the continent, by the venerable procedure of eating the berry, walking one day and depositing the seed on the ground with all its garnish of fertilizer and nitrates, to express it in some way. A bear may not be as good a farmer as Cain, but he doesn’t need to eat the largest berries and thus select the precursors of the amazing Cézanne apples that we see in our markets.
read on Matter Another very notable case is that of the tomato, which also grew in size on the American Pacific coast tens of thousands of years before humans set foot there. A complicated story of migrations, adaptations and selections followed, but someone or something had already started the work. There were no bears there, so the contest is open.