Coevolution in the Arable Battlefield: Pathways to Crop Domestication, Cultural Practices, and Parasitic Domesticoids

Abstract

This chapter is about domestication of various plants by Homo sapiens, the novel ecosystems that such domestication processes created, and other taxa that benefited from these anthropic environments. The coevolution of symbioses of different phyla is by no means unique to the domesticatory relationships of humans and their crops. Indeed, "agriculture" by ants, termites, and beetles are far more ancient in evolutionary terms and widespread across phyla and habitats (Mueller et al. 2005; McGhee 2011; see also chapters 1, 2, and 14, this volume). The parallels between humans and some insects raise fundamental questions about what is meant by terms such as "cultivation," "domestication," and "agriculture." For anthropologists and archaeologists these terms are often taken to be self-explanatory. Cultivation is something that people do-namely, learned cultural behaviors and labor investments whereby people plant crops in prepared plots of land. Domestication refers to the resultant changes, genetic and/or morphological, in the targeted plant taxa that become adapted to cultivation and provide a yield that is economic, often caloric, for the human cultivators. Agriculture is often distinguished based on scale, whether in terms of the degree of dependence on cultivated food for diet or in terms of the level of investment in agricultural activities , which is associated with the importance of cultivated food both to the human economy and ecology and as an obligate part of sustaining human communities and populations. Agricultural societies require cultivation to persist, whereas cultivation and use of domesti-cates may be undertaken on a variable scale by economies that could still be largely reliant on fishing, hunting, and/or gathering. Economies with a smaller reliance on cultivation, including many in which domestication traits were evolving in the crops, have often been recognized as distinctive and variously termed "intermediate economies" practicing "pre-domestication cultivation" (Hillman 1975; Harris 1989, 2012), low-level food production (Smith 2001), or food production with/without domesticates (Harris 1996; Fuller et al. 2018). In the general terms laid out by Mueller et al (2005), agriculture as we define it here requires "nutritional dependency" and the reorientation of social life to the production of food, whereas habitual planting, improvement of growth conditions, and harvesting without nutritional dependency constitutes nonagricultural cultivation. One of the striking features of agriculture is that it has evolved in parallel in different places and at different times, offering the opportunity to consider commonalities in process and causal variables. Mueller et al (2005) concluded that there were seven separate origins