Agriculture originated separately in several parts of the world. It originated at least twice in the New World (Central America and South America), in Mesopotamia, and in China. Agriculture may have had several separate origins in each of these areas, as well as in New Guinea. The only inhabited part of the world in which agriculture did not evolve was Europe; European agriculture was imported from the Middle East. Scientists and historians know that agriculture originated separately in these locations because the staple crops were different in each. The domesticated sump weeds and sunflowers grown by inhabitants of North America were replaced by Mexican maize and beans in pre-Columbian times.

Agriculture began earliest (about 10,000 years ago) in the Middle East, especially in the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain of Mesopotamia. Agriculture began there first, apparently because there were many wild species of plants that were almost suited for agriculture. Of the 56 species of wild grains that have large seeds, 32 grow in the Middle East. These wild grains needed little evolutionary transformation to become crops. The transformation from gathering to agriculture would have been a relatively quick and easy process in the Middle East.

At first, the transformation of wild into domesticated plants was effected unconsciously by the gatherers. Within each species of grain (for example, wild wheat or wild barley), the largest seeds, the seeds that shattered the least, and the ones that tasted the best were the ones that people preferentially gathered. The gatherers would also take grain seeds with them when they traveled and may also have cast them onto the ground in the new location. In this way, the seeds with the least dormancy were the ones most frequently chosen by the gatherers. Small, shattering, less palatable, dormant grains (the wild type) were thus gradually transformed, by unconscious natural selection and by deliberate artificial selection, into large, non-shattering, palatable, nondormant grains similar to today's crops. A similar process occurred in other wild food plants. . .

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