The domestication of wheat, beginning around 9600 BCE in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East, was among the founding events of settled agriculture. Wild einkorn and emmer wheat were gathered by hunter-gatherer communities in the region for millennia before deliberate cultivation and selection for non-shattering seed heads, larger grains and synchronized ripening produced domesticated einkorn and emmer, and later bread wheat through hybridization with a wild goatgrass. Wheat spread from this founding region across Europe, North Africa and Asia over the following millennia, becoming one of the handful of founder crops on which the Neolithic transition to farming rested, and it remains one of the most widely cultivated cereal crops in the world today.
Facts
Milestone Year LocationFertile Crescent, southern Levant 1 Classification
Type/ClassificationAgricultural Revolution or Transformation 1 Connections
Associated With
Wheat, Crops This milestone records the domestication event of the wheat crop it is directly named for.
Sources
1. Wikipedia, Wheat
Domestication section, first paragraph
The archaeological record suggests that wheat was first cultivated in the regions of the Fertile Crescent around 9600 BC.
Domestication section, wild emmer sentence
Wild emmer was first cultivated in the southern Levant, as early as 9600 BC.
lead description (milestone-kind)
The domestication of wheat, beginning around 9600 BCE in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East, was among the founding events of settled agriculture.
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