Thor Hanson - The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History

THE TRIUMPH OF SEEDS

ALSO BY THOR HANSON

Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle

The Impenetrable Forest: Gorilla Years in Uganda

Copyright 2015 by Thor Hanson

Published by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.

All art reproduced in this book is either in the public domain or used with permission.

Some material in this book has been reprinted from previously published works. The quotation from The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss (1945) is used by permission of HarperCollins. Quotations from The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan (2001) and from Tastes of Paradise by Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1992) are used by permission of Random House. The quotation from Empires of Food by Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas (2010) is used with the permission of Simon & Schuster. Quotations from Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1999) and from A River Lost by Blaine Harden (1996) are used by permission of W. W. Norton.

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Designed by Trish Wilkinson

Set in 10.5 point Goudy Oldstyle Std

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hanson, Thor, author.

The triumph of seeds : how grains, nuts, kernels, pulses, and pips, conquered the plant kingdom and shaped human history / Thor Hanson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-465-04872-4 (e-book) 1. Seeds. I. Title.

QK661.H36 2015

581.467dc23

2014047078

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Eliza and Noah

Contents

T hroughout this book I have chosen to stick with a functional definition of seeds, acknowledging that in some cases the seed-like part of a plant might also include tissues derived from the fruit (e.g., the shell of a nut). The text includes only common names of plants, but a complete list of all Latin binomials is included in . Ive tried to keep botanical jargon to an absolute minimum, or explain it with context, but have also compiled a short glossary (also at the back of the book). Finally, I encourage readers not to neglect the notes for each chapter. They include a wealth of juicy seed lore that couldnt be squeezed into the narrative, but was too good to leave out entirely.

I n writing this book I have relied on the help and patience of a huge range of generous people. Here, in no particular order, is a partial list of those who have given assistance along the waygranting interviews, loaning books and papers, answering questions, and even pitching in with some timely babysitting: Carol and Jerry Baskin, Christina Walters, Robert Haggerty, Bill DiMichele, Fred Johnson, John Deutch, Derek Bewley, Patrick Kirby, Richard Wrangham, Sam White, Michael Black, Chris Looney, Ole J. Benedictow, Micaela Colley, Amy Grondin, John Navazio, Matthew Dillon, Sarah Shallon, Elaine Solowey, Hugh Pritchard, Howard Falcon-Lang, Matt Stimson, Scott Elrick, Stanislav Oplutil, Bob Sievers, Phil Cox, Robert Druzinsky, Greg Adler, David Strait, Judy Chupasko, Diane Ott Whealy, Sophie Rouys, Pam Stuller, Noelle Machnicki, Chelsey Walker-Watson, Brandon Paul Weaver, Hiroshi Ashihara, Jeri Wright, Ronald Griffiths, Chifumi Nagai, Steve Meredith, David Newman, Richard Cummings, Giovanni Giustina, Jason Werden, Erin Braybrook, the International Spy Museum, Valria Forni Martins, Mark Stout, Al and Nellie Habegger, Thomas Boghardt, Ira Pastan, Kirsten Gallaher, Uno Eliasson, Jonathan Wendel, Duncan Porter, Charles Moseley, Boyd Pratt, Bella French, Paul Hanson, Aaron Burmeister, Nason and Erica Hamlin, John Dickie, Suzanne Olive, Amy Stewart, Derek and Susan Arndt, Kathleen Ballard, and Chris Weaver.

I am indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for granting me a fellowship specifically in support of the writing of this book. The Leon Levy Foundation also contributed generously to that fellowship.

Special thanks for help with research go to the University of Idaho Library and to the San Juan Island Library, with particular appreciation for the patience and diligence of Interlibrary Loan Coordinator Heidi Lewis.

Im grateful for the talents and enthusiasm of my agent, Laura Blake Peterson, and all her colleagues at Curtis Brown, and it has once again been a true pleasure to work with TJ Kelleher and the superlative team at Basic Books and Perseus, including (but not limited to) Sandra Beris, Cassie Nelson, Clay Farr, Michele Jacob, Trish Wilkinson, Nicole Jarvis, and Nicole Caputo.

Finally, none of this would be possible, or particularly enjoyable, without the love and support of my friends and family.

Sir, I can nothing say,

But that I am your most obedient servant.

William Shakespeare,

Alls Well That Ends Well (c. 1605)

C harles Darwin traveled with the HMS Beagle for five years, devoted eight years to the anatomy of barnacles, and spent most of his adult life ruminating on the implications of natural selection. The famed naturalist-monk Gregor Mendel hand-pollinated 10,000 pea plants over the course of eight Moravian springtimes, before finally writing up his thoughts on inheritance. At Olduvai Gorge, two generations of the Leaky family sifted through sand and rock for decades to piece together a handful of critical fossils. Unraveling evolutionary mysteries is generally hard work, the stuff of long careers spent in careful thought and observation. But some stories are obvious, crystal clear from the very beginning. Anyone familiar with children, for example, understands the origin of punctuation. It started with the exclamation point.

Nothing comes more naturally to a toddler than emphatic, imperative verbs. In fact, any word can be transformed into a command with the right inflectiona gleeful, insistent shout accented from a seemingly bottomless quiver of exclamation points. Whatever nuances of speech and prose might be gained by the use of comma, period, or semicolon clearly developed later. The exclamation point is innate.

Our son, Noah, is a good example. He began his verbal career with many of the expected phrases, from Move! and More! to the always-popular No! But his early vocabulary also reflected a more unusual interest: Noah was obsessed with seeds. Neither Eliza nor I can remember exactly when this passion began; it just seemed that he had always loved them. Whether speckling the skin of a strawberry, scooped from inside a squash, or chewed up in the rose hips he plucked from roadside shrubs, any seed that Noah encountered was worthy of attention and comment. In fact, determining which things had seeds, and which didnt, became one of the first ways he learned to order his world. Pinecone? Seeds. Tomato? Seeds. Apple, avocado, sesame bagel? All with seeds. Raccoon? No seeds.