Group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. He is author of the book Fruit from the Sands and has published dozens of scholarly articles while running research projects across Central Asia.
Spengler applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity, with the following results:
The ninety ninth page of Nature’s Greatest Success is bisected by two different and equally captivating topics; the page opens with the conclusion of a discussion of strawberry domestication. The popular narrative of strawberry domestication involves a farmer in the 1700s – a bit of a strawberry fanatic – who planted different species of strawberries in his garden, only to notice one day that something rather different was growing in his strawberry patch. I ask whether the process of stumbling across hybrid forms of a crop can be thought of as a proxy for some aspects of domestication in prehistory. If an ancient farmer suddenly discovered a unique form of a crop growing in their field, would they have tried to reproduce it, and, if so, which of the forms of plants in your produce market are a result of this process? The latter part of the page dives into the odd case of quinoa domestication, and I rationalize the ways that the process could not have involved human intentionality. In short, genetic features of the plant prevent active seed selection from fostering the process of domestication.Visit Robert N. Spengler III's website.
I believe that a reader picking the book up and thumbing to the page in question would gather enough of an understanding of the overall book that, if the topic catches their attention, they will return to page one and begin reading. The book spans a wide range of topics, using many case studies, with the goal of providing the reader with an idea of what domestication looked like in antiquity and how the foods they eat came into being.
Domestication remains one of the most captivating topics of scholarship across the sciences, as it is a key part of the story of what permitted humanity to become culturally modern. Without domesticated crops, you would not have any of the material goods that you take for granted, human populations would be low, cities could not exist, and the arts and sciences would not have developed. Geneticists, archaeologists, and ecologists have started to realize that humans in prehistory did not intentionally domesticate crops. This means that the evolutionary process that permitted human cultural development was a happy accident, as opposed to a great achievement of humanity. In Nature’s Greatest Success, I explore these new ideas about how domestication traits first evolved. In this book, I encourage the reader to think in different ways about ancient agriculture and the ongoing domestication processes all around you today. In short, the most important questions about humanity have remained unanswered because of long-standing misunderstandings about how ancient domestication occurred, and the true story of domestication is far more interesting than the long-standing narrative.
The Page 99 Test: Fruit from the Sands.
--Marshal Zeringue
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