It seems to me that the term "cultivated plants" you have already had to hear in everyday life. For the first time about this concept mentioned in the lessons of environmental education in junior classes general education school. But in this article I suggest reveal this concept wider, stopping in detail on the species of these representatives of the Flora of our planet, understand the history of their origin and the benefits that they are able to bring us.
Section 1. Cultural plants. Definition of concept
This species Plants, unlike wild, are specifically grown by man. What for? Well, goals can be very different. As a rule, in order to obtain certain foods or feed for farm animals. Sometimes they apply even as medicinal preparations.
Scientists claim that the cultural plant does not have its own range, which means that in artificially creating certain climatic conditions, it can be grown everywhere, i.e. Regardless of the place of initial origin. However, unfortunately, no view can spread natural way.
Section 2. Cultural plants and the history of their "domestication"
If you deepen in history, you can come to the conclusion that the hydrochlorination of this type of plant began quite a long time, even then, along with hunting and gathering, Aboriginal thought of growing what he needed. He began to collect seeds and throw them into a pre-explosive and moistened soil.
A little more time passed, and who by that time began to lead a more awaited life, learned to carefully worn over her sowing. Of course, it required the costs of strength and patience, but planted plants were regularly crowded and exempted from the ubiquitous weeds. There were even elevations around particularly valuable varieties, in order to protect seedlings from pulling or eating numerous animals.
At first, it was carried out very unconsciously, and the best cultures were chosen on the basis of only consumer qualities, for example, larger fruits or pleasant taste. But it was subsequently later and led to the creation of cultivated plants.
The very first, still very primitive agriculture served to the emergence of large centers for the cultivation of one or another type. Subsequently, from these very foci, as a result of travel, wars and mass trading, Flora representatives began to spread throughout the planet.
Section 3. Cultural plants and their types
Honestly, there are several ways to classify all cultivated plants of the planet. In this article I will try to tell about the most basic.
Quite often, these plants are classified, taking the basis of their economic purpose. As a result, it turns out that the following groups exist:
- feed;
- dye;
- medicinal;
- honey;
- food;
- spinning;
- technical.
I managed to detect another classification, but it, by virtue of my inconvenience, is used much less frequently. In accordance with it, cultural plants are considered based on the substances contained inside and happen:
- alkaloid-containing;
- protein-containing;
- fibrous;
- oily-oil;
- starchy;
- sugar;
- essential oil.
But the most logical and most frequently consumed classification is considered to be the basis of the sectoral principle. In accordance with it, cultures are divided into:
- vegetable (root, leafy, bulbous, fruit, spicy, stem);
- fruit (bone, walnut, seed, subtropical, citrus, berry);
- field (Bakhcheva (according to some scientists), legumes, grain, tuberplods, feed herbs, root, cereal, medicinal, oilseed, spinning, tobacco, ethereal).
In addition, there are two independent groups: grapes and decorative plantswhich are engaged, respectively, viticulture and flower growing.
Primitive people mined themselves food to hunting and harvesting wild fruits, berries, nuts, tubers, bulbs and other parts of ancient plants rich in starch and other nutrients.
Hunting did not always have been successful, and not at any time of year had the opportunity to collect vegetation food. But, collecting the fruits and roots of wild ancient plants, people noticed that the seeds, tubers or bulbs sprout on the ground germinate. Then they began to collect and sow seeds, planting tubers and bulbs wildlying near their habitats.
To do this, they began to handle the ground with a pointed stick. Later on the end of the stick began to attach a stone tip, which over time acquired the shape of the hoe.
Also now in Indo-China and on the island of Java, when cropping rice, enjoy a pointed stick: it makes wells for embedding grains in the soil. When a person began to domestic animals, he began to use them for the processing of the Earth, injected into a primitive plow made from the root of a tree. The first such plows appeared, obviously, about ten thousand years ago in Mesopotamia.
When developing agriculture, when people began to get more or less permanent yields With the fields cultivated by them, the nomadic lifestyle was changed to be settled. Originated permanent places settlements.
During the excavations of the settlement of 5-8-thousand years old, scientists found manual mills, tools of spinning and weaving crafts. In the dwellings of people of that time, fabrics of flax fibers are already found. They also found the fruits of nut and chestnut, apple tree seeds, pears and even grapes.
All this indicates a relatively high agricultural culture of people who lived then.
For millennia, a person took the most delicious and nutritious from ancient plants, giving the greatest harvestAnd grown them near their homes.
He improved and the tools that cultivated the Earth. Began to apply fertilizers when treating soil for crops. His knowledge of nature and development laws expanded vegetable world. Due to the selection of the best copies of certain wild ancient plants and the care of them, a person created many plants, which today are known to us only as cultural: wheat, rice, corn, barley, soybean, flax, sugar cane.
These plants gradually became disliked on their wild ancestors.
Take bread cereals: wheat, rice, corn. Their grains contain the stock of valuable nutrients starch and proteins. This is still in deep antiquity they attracted human attention.
Wheat grain was found in Egypt in the brick of the pyramid more than five thousand years ago.
Wheat grains are found in the remains of pile buildings; They are at least four thousand years. These grains are much smaller than the current varieties.
The numerous names of wheat in ancient languages \u200b\u200btalk about the deep antiquity of this culture in moderate climatic areas of Asia, Europe and Africa. Scientists suggest that wheat was cultivated at the time when a person did not possess a self-consolidated speech and people were explained by signs and individual sounds, that is, about fifty thousand years ago.
Selecting wheat from wild species is the best, the person evicted them. In turn. From cultural varieties, he chose such, whose grains were larger and contained the greatest amount of nutrients. Thanks to this selection and simultaneous improvement in crops, people created new wheat varieties. Now there are over 4 thousand Wheat varieties. All of them differ from the ancient grain size varieties and the larger margin of starch and proteins in them.
An ancient cultural plant is rice. For half of the population of Earth, rice is the main food product. And now in India and Africa there are several species of wild rice. African wild rice gives a good grain that is going to the population. This plant is annually resumed from Samosov, but his grain is so early falling that the harvest fee has to start long before full ripening.
The rice is cultured by a person as well as wheat, by means of centuries-old selection and improve the quality of cultivation. Due to this, the rice acquired a number of valuable properties, necessary person and very distinguishing him from wild rhodation. First of all, these are incommodability of grain.
Ancient cultural plant - corn penetrated Europe, Asia and Africa after the opening of America, her homeland. Its immediately rose in America was not found.
But there are two types of weed plants whose relationship with corn is undoubtedly. About how the corn has changed under the influence of man, says such a fact: in Mexico, in the caves of five thousand years old, in the soil at different depths were found corn chops. Cookies found in the lower layers of the soil, the magnitude and size of the grains are much less than the cobs found in its upper layers.
This indicates a relatively rapid change in corn under the influence of man.
Potatoes, tomatoes have become known in Europe Also only after the opening of America. American potatoes were very crap and bitter taste. The Indians are absacted him in the water, dried, and then they used to eat. We never had to eat bitter potatoes, for many years ago, people brought out of the American Dick beautiful varieties Large delicious potatoes still do not stop working on improving it.
Tomato - translated into Russian means "Golden Apple". There was a time when tomatoes were not eaten. They were planted in flower beds as decorative plants. But from the middle of the last century, tomatoes entered the life and as a food product first in Italy, and then in the rest of Europe and Asia. -
It also relatively recently, sugar beets, tea, coffee, hemp and other ancient plants began to be embedded.
Wonderful English scientist Charles Darwin for the first time with great care gathered many facts about changing plants and animals under the influence of man. Based on them, he created his ingenious theory of origin of species. He explained how in the course historical Development Mooding plants and animals change, and proved that these laws underlie the transformation and creating a person new forms of plants, new breeds of animals. The basis of this transformation is the ability of animals and plants not only to change under the influence of the conditions that the person creates them, but also transfer these changes to their offspring. But if Charles Darwin explained how changes in plants and animals occurred, then the Great Russian scientist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, relying on his teaching, developed the theory and methods of creating new plants. Here are the most important of these methods: crossing plants, remote from each other at their place of habitat and kinship, vaccination, that is, the splicing of plant tissues of different breeds, and, finally, directed planting of plants by changing the conditions of the external environment.
So, by moving the patterns of the development of ancient plants, the person became a converter of nature, the conscious creator of new plants. It creates more and more new varieties of cultivated plants, continuously increasing their productivity, yield, as well as the quality of products received from them.
| KeywordsCultural plants are so firmly included in human lifethat few people think of where the history of their indulgence began. Using vegetables and fruits in food, a person does not ask the question of how their wild relatives look like and how large the variety of cultivated plants.
Almost all cultural plants known today have their own historical roots, which define the centers of their appearance and gradual transformation.
The origin of cultivated plants refers to 50,000-60,000 to N. e. Until this period, the collection of plants was a way to survive the tribe, which was part of the duties of women. Historical testimonies that people began to select large and healthy grains and fruit to grow them near their homes, are the ancient utensils, pots with supplies in burials and their drawings.
To date, from the most popular 640 species of cultural plants, it is known that about 400 of them came from South Asia, 50 from Africa, more than 100 - from South and North America, the rest are from Europe.
Interesting Facts About the cultural plant, such as wheat, suggest that the cereals were the first species that people became consciously growing near the houses. The confirmation of this statement is the ancient mortar and pestles found on the place of settlement of cave people.
Plant Equity Centers
In the 20th century, scientists could more fully determine where they came from modern species Cultural plants. N. I. Vavilov decided to geography of crop production by 7 zones:
Wild-growing relatives of all these plants can still be found. At this, interesting facts about the cultural plant do not end.
Selection of ancient people
It is unlikely that you can call the cave people or later human Development Selectors, but they had some skills in the selection and growing plants.
Archaeologists came to the conclusion that agriculture and a settling lifestyle as a way of survival became applicable 10,000 years ago. It is this period that is considered to be the beginning of the plantation of plants. In fact, cultivated plants (examples of which archaeologists find in the places of ancient parking) began to divorce long before that.
According to scientists, collected wild grain, bone berries and other species of plants growing near the parking lots of the ancient people, when they wake up grain or threw bones along with smoke. In women, the tribe was made to pull out weeds near such "plantations", which was preserved to the present day.
Gradually, a person began to select the roots, grains and bones of the most delicious and large fruits and purposefully disembark them near their homes. Thus, the agriculture was originated, which gave the impetus to the new level of human development.
Variety of alignment plants today
Nowadays, the selection has become a science that works not only over the yield of cultivated plants, but also over their taste and increased survival. Almost all kinds of vegetables, fruits and cereals that eat in food modern man- hybrid, that is, derived artificially.
Interesting facts about the cultural plant, which was not just a selection, and crossing with other species is what is a completely new organism, which has no analogues in nature.
Mix, artificially derived in laboratories, are a disposable sowing material, but due to them the amount of delicious, giving a high crop of cultivated plants hundreds of times increased.
Today, hybridity touched both grain crops and fruits, and well-known vegetables, such as tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and many others.
Equity cucumbers
The cultural plant cucumber is so familiar on our table both in the fresh and canned form, that we are not asked by the question "And where he came to us at all."
It turns out that the way of cucumber on our table was rather big, since his homeland is India and China. Another 6,000 years ago, this vegetable was emphasized, although his ancient relatives still grow in Indian forests as Liana, whining tree trunks, and they are used to landscap in fences and hedges.
On frescoes B. Ancient Egypt, and then and the ancient Greece, this vegetable was depicted on the tables of rich people and for a long time Only high-ranking features was available.
The cucumbers brought the Greeks to Europe, and their distribution became rapid thanks taste And the possibility of peeling the future for the winter. Today, this vegetable is available to everyone and everywhere. Every gardener considers it to grow his duty good harvest Cucumbers for which they are used both varieties and hybrid.
Equity of indoor plants
People appreciated the plants not only for the possibility of eating them in food, but also for medical properties, as well as beauty. Interesting facts about the cultural plant, which from the wild state became the standard of beauty and tenderness relate to roses.
Rose has become a symbolic flower in many nations in antiquity. So, according to Indian legends, Lakshmi, the goddess of beauty, was born in a rose bud. She was devoted poets in various countries and at all times, and her homeland was tropical Southeast Asia. From there, the cultural plant Rosa moved to Ancient Greecewhere the aphrodite flower was called. IN Ancient Rome Even put the greenhouses for roses so that they bloom year-round.
Today, hundreds of varieties of this plant are known, bred by breeders for flower flows around the world.
Modern roses are grown in open soil, in pots on windowsill, in greenhouses and winter greenhouses. Of these, tasty and useful jam are preparing, and rose oil is considered one of the most expensive, since 500 kg of petals use to obtain one kilogram.
Cultural fruits
Just like grain and vegetables, fruits have become an indulgence object from ancient people. Beneficial features Berry and fruit plants, as well as the possibility of saving them in dried or uriced form made them permanent objects. The most famous fruits are apples, wild conifers who
X are found in the layers of the chalk period, and the dates. Today many fruit trees, which are 200-300 years ago were considered ingoing, they grow familiar in the gardens in the gardens.
Future of cultivated plants
Breeders around the world still work in their laboratories on the creation of new plant crops, which will be able to take root in unusual conditions for them and give unprecedented yields.
Thanks to their efforts, cultural plants are better transferring changes in climate, the exhaustion of the soil layer of the Earth and at the same time they give good yields.
Many cultural plants began to give two harvest per year or for the season, as they got a hybrid hardening. This gives hope that in the future there will be fresh vegetables and fruits on our tables, whose homeland has long ceased to be individual countries, and the whole world has become.
At the dawn of mankind, people had to be content with only what gave surrounding nature. Our ancestors collected the fruits of different trees, berries, grains of wild cereals and seeds bob plants, dug up tubers and bulbs. The transition from gathering to cultivating plants was long. Archaeologists believe that farming exists at least 10 thousand years, and attempts to ochulted plants at least 40-50 thousand years ago. Already then, protecting wild useful plants, women smeared the grass around them, loosened the soil.
Agriculture and crop production arose in ancient times. In the ancient Egyptian fresco, the harvest of wheat - harvest, knitting and transportation of sheafs, laying them in the skird and threads.
Plants were injected into the culture of different ways. Seeds wild fruit trees and berry Sustainers They fell into the soil near the housing of the man and they germinated here. The grains of bread plants often wake up near the housing on the ground, containing many decomposed garbage. Plants from such seeds developed significantly better than in the steppe or in the forest. It could bring our ancestors to the thought of growing them near the housing, instead of looking in the forests and steppes.
A primitive man was collected by the plants that surrounded him: on the mainland of Eurasia - some species, in Africa - others, in America - Third. Therefore, on different continents There were a lot of fortune different species. Most cultures come from Europe, Asia and Africa. Of the 640 most important cultivated plants globe More than 530 comes from these parts of the world, and about 400 gave South Asia. In Africa, approximately 50 cultural species appeared, North and South America - Motherland more than 100 of them. In Australia, there were no cultural plants before the arrival of Europeans.
The doctrine of the centers of origin of cultivated plants created an outstanding Soviet scientist N. I. Vavilov. He set 7 of the main centers of their origin: 5 - in the old world and 2 - in the new.
The most ancient of modern grain cereals - wheat, barley, millet, rice and corn. Types of cultural wheat occur at least from three wild cereals growing in Asia Minor, Southern Europe and North Africa. The wheat culture existed already in the era of Neolithic. In the excavations of neolithic settlements in Europe, there were grains of wheat, pea seeds, lentils and beans. Rice Motherland - India and Indochina. There have been found a lot of wild forms of this plant. Relatively late, approximately by the beginning of our era, in the Transcaucasus or in Malaya Asia there was a rye, and a little earlier - Oats. Motherland corn and potatoes - South and Central America. In Peru and Mexico, we are obliged to the emergence of cultural types of tomatoes, podpid peppers, pumpkins, beans. Central America gave a tobacco culture, and North-sunflower. Vegetable crops - Cabbage, turnip, radish, beets, carrots, onions - were known in ancient times and originated from the Mediterranean.
IN tropical countries South America There were bars (sweet potatoes), pineapple and peanuts. Indochina gave oranges, lemons and others citrus plants. Coffee comes from Ethiopia - his wild ancestor is growing there. Tea is introduced into the culture in the mountainous areas of the Burma. Cocoa was known in Mexico before the coming there by Europeans. Cocoa beans played even the role of money there.
In very distant times, a person began to cultivate spinning plants. In Europe, they were introduced into the culture of Len, in China - hemp, in America and Asia - cotton.
Later, with the development of navigation, especially in the era of the Great geographic discoveries, there was a resettlement of cultivated plants from one continent to another. So, in Europe from America, corn, pumpkin, beans, tomatoes, peppers, sunflower and tobacco.
From year to year, from the century in the century of farmers, improving the cultural techniques, simultaneously improved the plants themselves, selecting the seeds for sowing the most damned of them or possess any particularly valuable property.
A gradual improvement in cultivated plants was a matter of not one generation - it continued the Millennium. Agricultural tribes gradually spread over the ground, and cultural plants spread with them. With the appearance and distribution on the Earth of cultivated plants, the living conditions of people have changed. The emergence and development of agriculture led to a huge shift in the history of human society.
A huge variety of cultural plants, thanks to which we have many delicious and useful products food, modern people perceived as proper. Meanwhile, we will be in the Stone Age, there would be no large and juicy apples there, neither sweet yellow bananas nor huge corn cobs. And many wild plants that are ancestors of modern cultural, we probably would not even know. In this post, the cultural plants have changed over the past hundreds and thousands of years thanks to the methods of breeding and our ancestors.
1) Apple tree
This plant is known to people from ancient times. There are several types of wild apple trees common in Europe and Asia. At the same time, according to genetic research, the ancestors of modern cultural varieties are two types: Sivers apple tree and wild forest apple tree.
Apple tree Siversa
Wild forest apple tree
Both of these species have small fruits (from 2 to 5 cm in size) and not the most pleasant taste. Apples Sievers are bitter taste, and the fruits of wild forest apple trees are very sour. However, the crossing and selection of these species led to the emergence of modern cultural varieties.
It is believed that the first to begin to grow apple trees Central Asiawho lived to the west of Tien Shan Mountain, and it happened more than 2,000 years ago. After the conquests of Alexander the Macedonian apple tree, they fell into Greece, and from there spread throughout Europe. The Greeks and Romans were a lot of worried to bring new juicy and sweet apples.
In Russia, apples for a long time were almost the only fruit. The apple trees appeared in the monastery gardens in the 11th century, and in the 18th century the Russian breeder of bolotov described about 600 sorts of apples.
2) Wheat, corn and other cereals
The cereals are known to people for a very long time, and precisely from the cultivation of wheat, barley and other cereals more than 10 thousand years ago neolithic revolution began. Homeland wheat and barley is the Middle East, their cultivation began, probably on the territory of modern Iraq and Turkey.
Wild-growing barley
Wild-growing species differed noticeably from modern cultural. They had smaller grain and fewer their number in the colosue. But the main disadvantage was that the mature grain immediately crumbled on Earth, so they were very difficult to collect them. Only over time, the varieties were brought, which it was convenient to collect - to press whole ears along with the grains, and then cooler.
Corn. american Indians Began to grow more than 5,000 years ago. The exact ancestor of modern corn is not installed, but the closest to it wild plants - Theosynt - looks like this:
It is not enough that he has little grain and they are small, so have these grains a rather solid shell.
3) bananas
Banana We know how soft and sweet fruit yellow color. But the wild ancestors of bananas were completely different. These were small, green and hard fruits, in addition filled with seeds.
Wild bananas
Nevertheless, people found something useful in this fruit. Several thousand years ago, people began to grow bananas in South-East AsiaAnd then they gradually spread around the world.
Bananas selection ranked pretty for a long time. More Spanish conquerors who brought bananas to America 500 years ago, considered them feed for slaves and animals. At this time, bananas were still inedible in the raw form, they needed to cook or fry. Only by the end of the 19th century modern varieties of bananas were derived, which quickly became one of the favorite foods among the inhabitants of the United States and Europe.
4) carrots
Wild-growing carrots have long grown in extensive territories of Eurasia. People used the roots of this plant in food, but the wild carrots are bitter and hard, so that this vegetable has not been popular. The carrot was known to the ancient Greeks and the Romans, but in the era of the Middle Ages she was forgotten.
Wild carrots
The carrots in Europe returned from the East. It is believed that the place where the modern carrots varieties occur, is the territory of modern Afghanistan, it is here that in the 10th century, the carrots began to grow specially. In the 12th-13 centuries, carrots again hit Europe. At this time, the carrots were different colors - From white to purple. Only in the 16-17th centuries in Holland, the usual orange varieties of carrots with thick sweet root roots were derived.
5) Watermelons
Motherbuz is Southwestern Africa. Wild ancestors of modern watermelons are still growing in the Kalahari desert.
Wild watermelons in the desert
The fruits of wild watermelons are small - no more than 10 cm and bitter taste. Another 4000 years ago, they were discovered by the ancient Egyptians and began to grow, however, not for eating food, but to obtain oil from seeds. The ancient Romans began to plant watermelons and boil the jam from it.
Gradually watermelons began to grow in different countries. They became more and sweeter, but another 17 century. Watermelons differed quite very much from modern:
Watermelons on the picture of the Italian artist 17 V.
A noticeable contribution to the selection of watermelons was deposited by Russia, where watermelon got another 13th century. After the fall of Astrakhan, the Caspian steppes became one of the main centers of breeding watermelons, where large, sweet and drought-resistant varieties were bred.
6) Peaches
As it is clear from the name, peaches came to Russia and Europe. However, the birthplace of peaches is China, and here these fruits began to grow 4,000 years ago.
the wild ancestors of peach looked like this
Scientists are inclined to the fact that modern peaches are the result of a hybridization of several species, however, the wild ancestors of the peach were very small with a large bone and salt-flavored taste, and their size was only 2-3 cm. Modern peach about 60 times (by weight) Wild precursors.
7) Cucumbers
The cucumbers began to grow in India for a very long time, about 4-6 thousand years ago. The ancient Greeks and the Romans grown cucumbers in large numbers and considered them very useful for the health product. Details of the selection of cucumbers are unknown, but wild cucumbers are still growing in India in large numbers.
Wild cucumbers
Wild cucumbers are small, bitter and very spiny. Locals use them overgrown to decorate fences and walls.
8) Cabbage
Cabbage is one of the few cultivated plants that occurs not from some remote places, but from the territory of Europe.
Warming cabbage
Also wild cabbage is quite edible and has a taste resembling ordinary cultural varieties. white cabbage. True, the leaves of this cabbage are more rigid and, of course, do not form kochanov.
Cabbage began to grow in southern Europe more than 4 thousand years ago. The ancient Greeks and the Romans loved the cabbage very much and believed that she heals from many diseases. Ancient times grown cabbage and Slavs, who had one of the main vegetable crops.
What is the result? Sometimes it is believed that breeding and artificial selection is something that resembles the methods of modern genetic engineering. Not really. Our ancestors, engaged in the elimination of cultural varieties, did not interfere in the genotype and crossed among themselves only nearby species. So rather, on the contrary, the above examples are examples of the success of traditional selection methods showing what can be achieved without the use of GMOs.