s of domesticated Crescent

places at different times. Implicit in this debate has been a recognition that the transition to agriculture is itself a multi-episode process that begins with gathering from the wild and ends with the cultivation of plants that have undergone the full suite of genetic and phenotypic changes that characterise the domesticated crop [2,3]. Anthropol-ogists, ecologists and evolutionists have proposed various models for the role of humans in thismulti-episode process, these ranging from a view of agriculture as one of the inspired human inventions of the past [4] to hypotheses that define domestication as the outcome of a natural coevolutionary process driven by the predator–prey relationship between humans and edible plants [5,6]. And finally, but by no means least, geneticists have Revie