ABSTRACT
With the development of first high cultures in Africa, Asia, and America, agriculture and breeding of optimally usable plants reached a heyday. Cultivation, the first step toward domestication, begins at least for the seed crops, with planting of harvested seeds by man to provide a new crop. At least six regions of domestication have been identified, including Central America, the southern Andes, the Near East, Africa (Sahel and Ethiopia), Southeast Asia, and China. At the old cultural centers of the world, such as China, Egypt, and Asia Minor, around the Mediterranean Sea or Central and South America, since thousands of year’s agriculture, often with irrigation, was practiced.
First peasants settled in the Fertile Crescent between Euphrates, Tigris, and the Mediterranean over 11,000 years ago. They started to breed cereals, vegetables, and fruit trees. Since 7700 years what fossils show is that rice is grown by Chinese. Already during the early Stone Age, forests and bushland were burned down in order to gain land for cropping. Fields were even irrigated. Agriculture was based on small, walled communities with contiguous fields. Plows were made of wood, stone, and then iron, but the basic tool was the hoe. Soil was amended with natural fertilizer.
Three great civilizations were found in America, known today as Aztec, Maya, and Inca. These were great monumental cultures—similar in many respects to the Egyptian civilization of 2000 BC—with enormous temples in the form of pyramids, pictorial writing, a system of cities and government, a developed agriculture, and a magnificent art. Besides maize, other plants, such as potato, sweet potato, tomato, chili pepper, amaranth, pineapple, beans, avocado, or chocolate (cacao), were grown in gardens and small fields. They ate the pallet of the food of today’s world.
All these cultures contributed gradually to modern plant breeding, including their biotechnological and genetic engineering methods.
