ABSTRACT
The evolution of man, crops and stock in the silent millennia was a matter of mutual selection, a kind of process in animal and plant adaptation where all parties to the transaction effectively modify one another. Advances in the widely separated fields of archaeology and genetics lead to question some of the ideas about the origin of agriculture which may have earlier seemed most acceptable. One of these is the idea that the domestication of animals in general preceded the cultivation of plants. Another is the idea that agriculture arose independently in many different regions both of the Old World and the New, regions which only later coalesced. A third is the idea that agriculture began in the easiest way with the easiest crops that is with the root crops of tropical regions. These ideas have been ably expounded by Sauer, Coon, von Wissmann and others.
