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Woolgathering is a practice similar to gleaning, but for wool. The practice was of collecting bits of wool that had gotten caught on bushes and fences or fallen on the ground as sheep passed by. The meandering perambulations of a woolgatherer give rise to the idiomatic sense of the word as meaning aimless wandering of the mind. [36]
In 1988, the Israeli botanist Daniel Zohary and the German botanist Maria Hopf formulated their founder crops hypothesis. They proposed that eight plant species were domesticated by early Neolithic farming communities in Southwest Asia (Fertile Crescent) and went on to form the basis of agricultural economies across much of Eurasia, including Southwest Asia, South Asia, Europe, and North ...
This migration event also saw the introduction of cultivated and domesticated food plants from Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, and New Guinea into the Pacific Islands as canoe plants. Contact with Sri Lanka and Southern India by Austronesian sailors also led to an exchange of food plants which later became the origin of the valuable spice trade.
The cultivation of plants and the acquisition of domesticated traits did not occur at the same time, since the latter is the consequence of the former: a first phase of “pre-domestic” plant cultivation, in which species still have a wild morphology, as the selection process has not yet succeeded in bringing about morphological changes (i.e ...
Vavilov's 1924 scheme suggested that plants were domesticated in China, Hindustan, Central Asia, Asia Minor, Mediterranean, Abyssinia, Central and South America. A Vavilov center or center of origin is a geographical area where a group of organisms, either domesticated or wild, first developed its distinctive properties. [1]
The earliest cultivated plant in North America is the bottle gourd, remains of which have been excavated at Little Salt Spring, Florida dating to 8000 BCE. [7] Squash (Cucurbita pepo var. ozarkana) is considered to be one of the first domesticated plants in the Eastern Woodlands, having been found in the region about 5000 BCE, though possibly not domesticated in the region until about 1000 BCE.
Land plants evolved from a group of freshwater green algae, perhaps as early as 850 mya, [3] but algae-like plants might have evolved as early as 1 billion years ago. [2] The closest living relatives of land plants are the charophytes, specifically Charales; if modern Charales are similar to the distant ancestors they share with land plants, this means that the land plants evolved from a ...
Theophrastus's Enquiry into Plants or Historia Plantarum (Ancient Greek: Περὶ φυτῶν ἱστορία, Peri phyton historia) was, along with his mentor Aristotle's History of Animals, Pliny the Elder's Natural History and Dioscorides's De materia medica, one of the most important books of natural history written in ancient times, and like them it was influential in the Renaissance.