Nature’s Greatest Success: How plants evolved to exploit humanity
Robert N Spengler III
University of California Press, £ 25.00
This books makes for a refreshing and comprehensive approach to the domestication of plants and of various animals. In contrast to many accounts about domestication, it concentrates on the evolution of the plants and animals themselves, rather than the activities of humans. Plants are constantly evolving, and some phenotypic traits are responses to human cultural behaviours. Humans have been driving plant evolution unconsciously through their mobility for millennia, but only in the last two centuries has the domestication been more deliberate.
Island biogeography is a central theme throughout this book because isolation into small populations where founder effects and genetic bottlenecks occur lead to variations that are picked up by humans. Much emphasis is given to the evolutionary interactions between plants and animals for seed dispersal, as many of the plants that humans now use were in fact domesticated by the animals with which the plants evolved, where evolution favoured plants that developed successful methods of seed dispersal.
Domestication began with the mammals and birds that selected phenotypic variations in fruits and seeds. Primates chose the more fleshy fruits, even creating orchards with their dispersal of the seeds. Many large fruits were developed by long-extinct animals such as the gomphotheres, the giant lemurs of Madagascar and the large primate Gigantopithecus. Selection pressure from large mammals in the Eocene resulted in such enlarged fruits as the papaya, avocado, cacao and calabash that later became crops for humans. The first grasslands and savannahs also coevolved with larger bodied ruminants and the grasses now used by humans came about by the coevolution between mammals and plants that long preceded humans. Evolution produced such traits as thinner seeds coats, tough rachises and loss of dormancy that became of great use to humans.
The key message of the book is that the early domestications of both plants and animals was largely the result of insularity and an adaptation to an anthropogenic landscape without predators, pathogens, pests and herbivores. This book will be useful for students of island biogeography, commensalism, coevolution, seed dispersal and patterns of evolution – as well as those studying the domestication of plants.
Professor Sir Ghillean Prance FRSB
Robert N Spengler III is director of the Paleoethnobotany Laboratories at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena and is also the author of Fruits of the Sands: How the Silk Road shaped your dinner table (2017).
