Building on the Middle East's reputation as one of the historical birthplaces of cereal crop domestication, a KAUST-led team has compiled the first complete genome map of an ancient grain known as einkorn.
The Neolithic revolution, which occurred about 12,000 years ago, fundamentally altered the economy, diet, and social structure of the earliest human societies in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. Currently, a study examines the development of wheat spikes since ancient Mesopotamians, the region that served as the cradle of agriculture between the Tigris and the Euphrates, first cultivated the crop.