Atlantis Beneath the Ice by Rand Flem-Ath Page A

worlds’ most important crops—wheat and barley—were shaped to humans’ design between eleven thousand and twelve thousand years ago, 2 at the time that Plato tells us Atlantis perished.
    Plato’s vision is also remarkable for the fact that it presents a physical rather than a mythological cause of agriculture. Before his time, all explanations relied upon the intervention of gods and goddesses toaccount for the beginning of agriculture. In contrast to these mythological origins of agriculture, Plato presents a very different picture. In his view, agriculture re-emerges after the destruction of a great and advanced civilization by earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence. There are no gods or goddesses to suddenly intervene in the affairs of humankind. Instead, Plato sees the emergence of agriculture as a long, slow battle to recover the foundations of a lost civilization. His is a vision of human beings struggling against the vastly transformed physical conditions brought in the wake of the Great Flood.
    We’ve traveled eons in our methods of farming since those first desperate days. In the process we have become dependant on a few key crops and domesticated animals. In North America, the great “breadbasket of the world,” only a small fraction of the population toils to harvest the crops. The efforts of these few, with their highly specialized equipment, have transformed the landscape. To create ever more fertile plants, we intervene in the reproductive process of many crops such as wheat, rice, and corn—crops that would soon be swallowed by wild grasses if left to fend for themselves.
    Mile after mile of domestic grains, bent to humankind’s design, have replaced prairie grasses. From the transformed American prairie to the African savanna and Brazilian jungle, wild vegetation has submitted to the demands of the plow. Squeezed by overpopulation, we continuously strip away the natural garment of the earth and cover it with a cloth of our own weave. Our reliance on agriculture is complete. We can’t turn back.
    The search to explain the profound mystery of the sudden rise of agriculture on different continents following the climatic changes of 9600 BCE has been one of archaeology’s most persistent quests.
    THE MODERN SEARCH FOR AGRICULTURAL ORIGINS
    In 1886, Alphonse de Candolle took a botanical approach to the problem of the origins of agriculture. He wrote, “One of the most direct means ofdiscovering the geographic origin of a cultivated species is to seek in what country it grows spontaneously, and without the help of man.” 3
    A dedicated, and ultimately doomed, Soviet botanist, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887–1943), saw the possibilities in de Candolle’s approach. For two decades, Vavilov patiently gathered a collection of over fifty thousand wild plants. He chose plants that are genetically linked to the domesticated variety we rely on today. Vavilov discovered “eight independent centers of origin of the most important cultivated plants.” They were located on the earth’s highest mountain ranges. He wrote, “It is clear that the zone of initial development of the most important cultivated plants lies in the strip between 20° and 45° north latitude, near the high mountain ranges, the Himalayas, the Hindu Kish, those of the Near East, the Balkans, and the Appennines. In the Old World this strip follows the latitudes while in the New World it runs longitudinally. In both cases conforming to the general direction of the great mountain ranges.” 4 Although he was unaware of it, Vavilov’s meticulously measured results support Plato’s claim that mountain elevations were crucial to the reemergence of agriculture (see figure 8.1 ).
    Figure 8.1. When we place Antarctica at the center of a world map, we can see (a) the sites where agriculture originated according to the Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov. Most domesticated plants were originally domesticated in (b) sites at 1,500 meters