Domestication interests us as the most momentous change in Holocene human history. Why did it operate on so few wild species, in so few geographic areas? Why did people adopt it at all, why did they adopt it when they did, and how did it spread? The answers to these questions determined the remaking of the modern world, as farmers spread at the expense of hunter–gatherers and of other farmers.
Plant and animal domestication is the most important development in the past 13,000 years of human history. It interests all of us, scientists and non-scientists alike, because it provides most of our food today, it was prerequisite to the rise of civilization, and it transformed global demography. Because domestication ultimately yielded agents of conquest (for example, guns, germs and steel) but arose in only a few areas of the world, and in certain of those areas earlier than in others, the peoples who through biogeographic luck first acquired domesticates acquired enormous advantages over other peoples and expanded. As a result of those replacements, about 88% of all humans alive today speak some language belonging to one or another of a mere seven language families confined in the early Holocene to two small areas of Eurasia that happened to become the earliest centres of domestication — the Fertile Crescent and parts of China. Through that head start, the inhabitants of those two areas spread their languages and genes over much of the rest of the world. Those localized origins of domestication ultimately explain why this international journal of science is published in an Indo-European language rather than in Basque, Swahili, Quechua or Pitjantjatjara.