Abstract
The domestication of wheat and barley was the most important step in the emergence of farming communities that later led to the ancient civilisation in Mesopotamia. Several lines of evidence indicated that emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum ssp. dicoccum, genome: AABB, 2n = 28) was the earliest domesticated wheat derived from the wild emmer (ssp. dicoccoides) and that it was domesticated within the Fertile Crescent of southwest Asia. Emmer was the main crop during the spread of Neolithic agriculture from the Fertile Crescent to Europe, Eurasia, and Africa. However the precise location and history of the emmer domestication remain unknown. Here we show that a major chloroplast haplotype of domesticated emmer was found in only 4% of wild emmer accessions, all collected from the northern Fertile Crescent. The result shows that the domestication of emmer wheat belonging to this major lineage occurred in this region.
