Hayes and Garber - Cucurbit Breeding

BREEDING CROP PLANTS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The origin and mode of development of nearly all of our
principal cultivated crops is an obscure and much debated subject.
This is partly due to the fact that many crops have been
grown for hundreds of years and often the same forms are cultivated
as were grown in early periods. It is very probable, for
example, that the men of the old stone age, 50,000 years ago, had
some sort of art of agriculture (Dettweiler, 1914). These conclusions
have been drawn from old engravings of this period
which were made on cavern walls. Wheat and barley were certainly
grown in early times. A carving of the upper Paleolithic
age in the Pyrenees mountains shows winter barley such as is now
cultivated in that locality.
Dettweiler writes very interestingly of the agriculture of the
Lake Dwellers who lived during the period from 4,000 to 2,000
years B.C. He states that the Lake Dwellers of Switzerland
cultivated the short-eared, six-rowed barley, Hordeum sanctum of
the ancients; the dense-eared, six-rowed variety, H. hexastichon
L.,
variety densum; two-rowed barley, H. distichon; small lakedwelling
wheat, Triticum vulgare antiquorum; true Binkel wheat,
T. vulgare compactum; Egyptian or English wheat, T. turgidum,
L.; an awnless thick-eared emmer, T. dicoccum, Schrank; onegrained
wheat, T. monococcum, L.; meadow (common) millet,
Panicum miliaceum, L.; club millet, P. italicum, L.; and a type of
flax, Linum angustifolium, which still grows wild in Greece. An
excavation was made in the village of Gleichberg, near Romhild
in 1906. On an old fireplace, with remains of the oldest Bronze
age, were found the following seeds: einkorn, spelt, binkel, and
small lake-dwelling wheat, small lake-dwelling barley, vetch,
peas, poppy, and possibly apple seeds.
It is not the purpose to give the historical development of
crops except to show that many were cultivated in very ancient
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