| Abstract: |
Cereals, together with other seed crops like grain legumes and pseudo-cereals, have been fundamental to the transformation of human economies from hunting and gathering to agriculture and urbanization. The study of archaeological plant remains, archaeobotany, provides a growing dataset through which domestication and the spread of these crops can be mapped in both time and space over the long-term. Archaeobotanical remains provide evidence for how crops evolved during the domestication process, including non-shattering spikes and increased grain size. The evolution of domestication can be then analyzed as a co-evolutionary process with human behaviors, technologies and cooking traditions can be recognized that were related to different cases of agricultural origins and have had a first cereal domestications, agriculture has had the challenge of diversity loss but also recurrent period of diversity gain through new domestications and through the transfer of crop diversity between cultures.
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