It is a truism of science to say that one cannot solve a problem unless one asks the right sort of questions; and to ask the right questions it is necessary to look at the problem from a particular viewpoint. That viewpoint, so far as the origin of domesticated plants is concerned, is, I am convinced, the ecological one. I shall hope to show that we must look at wild and cultivated plants associated with man as an ecological complex and view this in relation to the ecology of man himself. If we do this we can make considerable progress in understanding the mechanism of domestication, verifying and, when necessary, modifying our hypotheses by reference to exact archaeobotanical data.
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