Delanceyplace.com 1/7/08-Fifteen Plants

In today's excerpt--the importance of plant domestication and the fifteen most important plants:

"In the long view of time, the domestication of plants ... occurred nearly simultaneously in various parts of the world. In the short view of time, however, within a few thousand years some areas lagged behind others with fateful consequences. Because people in the Americas had no suitable grains and animals for early domestication, the evolution of complex societies there began 3,000 to 4,000 years later than in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. As a consequence, when Europeans arrived in the Americas in 1500 CE, they found societies in many ways comparable to those of the Middle East in about 2000 BCE. With their horses, guns, and diseases, products of their more evolved agrarian societies, Europeans were able to strangle the more slowly emerging civilizations of the Americas.

"People's experiments with plants between 9000 and 3000 BCE were so successful that no new basic food plants have been domesticated since then. The only exceptions seem to be cranberries, blueberries, and pecans, which were gathered by native North Americans but have been domesticated only in the last two centuries.

"Out of approximately 200,000 species of flowering plants, only about 3,000 have been used extensively for human food. Of these, only fifteen have been and continue to be of major importance: four grasses (wheat, rice, maize, and sugar), six legumes (lentils, peas, vetches, beans, soybeans, and peanuts), and five starches (potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, maniocs, and bananas)."

Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History, The New Press, Copyright 2007 by Cynthia Stokes Brown, pp. 82-83.