“Beginnings of Fruit Growing in the Old World” — two generations later

Abstract

This paper reviews our current knowledge on Near-Eastern fruit tree domestication, and compares this to the data presented by Daniel Zohary and Pinhas Spiegel-Roy in their seminal paper “Beginnings of Fruit Growing in the Old World”, which was published in Science in 1975. In both papers, the data under consideration include discussion of archaeobotanical assemblages from representative sites across southwest Asia, as well as data provided by living plants – particularly by wild relatives of the crops concerned and molecular data of the crop plants and their wild relatives. On the one hand, it was found that many of Zohary and Spiegel-Roy's conclusions remain valid – the wild progenitors of domesticated fruit trees, olives, grapevine and dates were domesticated during the Chalcolithic period, and fig during the Early Bronze Age period. On the other hand, molecular data indicate that in both the olive and grapevine, genetic materials outside the Levant were later added to the domesticated stock, and that the center of domestication for grapes does not actually include Greece, but was actually only in the Levant; that figs were domesticated in the eastern Mediterranean, rather than all over the Mediterranean; and that Lower Mesopotamia is still a plausible center of date domestication, along with the southern Fertile Crescent oases.