This book provides a comprehensive interdisciplinary overview of human-plant interactions and their social consequences from the hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic Era to the 21st century molecular manipulation of crops. It links the latest advances in molecular genetics, climate research and archaeology to give a new perspective on the evolution of agriculture and complex human societies across the world. Even today, our technologically advanced societies still rely on plants for basic food needs, not to mention clothing, shelter, medicines and tools. This special relationship has tied together people and their chosen plants in mutual dependence for well over 50,000 years. Yet despite these millennia of intimate contact, people have only domesticated and cultivated a few dozen of the tens of thousands of potentially available edible plants. This limited domestication process led directly to the evolution of the complex urban-based societies that have dominated much of human development over the past ten millennia. Thanks to the latest genomic studies, we can now begin to explain how, when, and where some of the most important crops came to be domesticated, and the crucial roles of plant genetics, climatic change and social organisation in these processes. Indeed, it was their unique genetic organisations that ultimately determined which plants eventually became crops, rather than any conscious decisions by their human cultivators. The book is aimed at a wide audience ranging from plant specialists such as geneticists, molecular biologists and agronomists to a more general readership of archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and others who wish to explore the complex processes that have shaped the often crucial relationships between plants and human societies over the past hundred millennia.

People and Plants: two hundred millennia of coevolution 1. Early human societies and their plants 2. Plant management and agriculture 3. How some people became farmers Crops and their Genetics: 90 million years of evolution 4. Plant genomes 5. Fluid genomes, uncertain species, and the genetics of crop domestication 6. The domestication of cereal crops 7. The domestication of non-cereal crops People, Plants, and Farming in Prehistoric Times: ten millennia of climatic and social change 8. People and the emergence of crops 9. Agriculture: a mixed blessing 10. Evolution of agro-urban cultures I: the Near East 11. Evolution of agro-urban cultures II: East and South Asia 12. Evolution of agro-urban cultures III: Africa, Europe and the Americas People and Plants in Historic Times: globalisation of agriculture and the rise of science 13. Crop management in the Classical and Medieval Periods 14. Agricultural improvement and the rise of crop breeding 15. Imperial Botany and the early scientific breeders 16. Agricultural Improvement in modern times 17. The future of agriculture and humanity

Denis J Murphy , Head of Biotechnology Unit, Division of Biological Sciences, University of Glamorgan, UK