How it began
Einkorn was among the first cereals brought into cultivation when farming emerged in the Near East. In 1997 M. Heun, F. Salamini and colleagues published a study in the journal Science that looked for the place where it happened. They found that a group of wild einkorn lines growing in the Karacadağ mountains of southeastern Turkey is the likely ancestor of the cultivated varieties. The paper states that cultivated einkorn was domesticated about 10,000 years ago from these wild lines.
Before it existed
Before domestication people in the region gathered the wild form of the plant, known to botanists as Triticum monococcum subspecies boeoticum. The farmed form is subspecies monococcum. The study compared the two on traits that matter to a harvester, including the number of spikelets on each ear and how brittle the rachis is. The rachis is the stem of the ear; in the study it was scored from tough to very brittle, and a brittle one lets the ear break apart.
How it works
The team sampled 338 lines of einkorn and compared them at 288 marker positions in the DNA, using a method called amplified fragment length polymorphism. From the frequency of the variants at each position they built a family tree of the lines. Eleven wild lines collected in the Karacadağ region sat closest to the cultivated varieties in that tree. Excavations of early farming settlements nearby, dated from 7800 to 7500 BCE, support the conclusion that domestication began near these mountains.
What lasted
The study gave the origin of a founder crop of Near Eastern farming a specific place on the map, in the same part of southeastern Anatolia where early settlements such as Cafer Höyük and Nevali Çori have been excavated. It also showed that DNA fingerprinting of living plants could be used to locate where a crop was first domesticated, by finding the wild population most closely related to the farmed one.
