Nature’s Greatest Success

This lecture is part of the ISAW Library events series and will take place in person at ISAW.

Registration is required at THIS LINK.

The domestication of plants in prehistory allowed humanity to demographically expand, form dense population congregations (urbanism and social hierarchies), and advance the arts and sciences. For millennia, humans drove the evolution of domestication traits in crops and animals. A clear understanding of what the domestication of ancient crops looked like can tell scholars about the processes that permitted humanity to become culturally modern. The study of ancient domestication has been a central theme in archaeology for more than a century and the shifting theoretical views picked up by scholars have reflected the trends of their time. Dr. Spengler will briefly explore a few key themes in this rich history of theory in order to segue into novel perspectives that are growing in popularity among specialists today.

22 independent or nearly independent centers of plant domestication from the ancient world

Over the past decade, experts spanning the biological and social sciences have come to a near consensus that ancient humans did not intentionally cause these evolutionary changes in plants, i.e., ancient domestication was not akin to breeding. According to this view, humanity only developed the science of breeding over the past four centuries, resulting in rapid phenotypic diversification. Currently archaeologists, ecologists, and geneticists are all working to develop new theories about how domestication in antiquity occurred; one of these theories – the ecological release hypothesis – suggests that crops and animals evolved traits of domestication as a response to humans simply removing predators and herbivores. In this talk, Dr. Spengler will expand upon this idea by drawing parallels between the ways that organisms evolve on islands, arguing that the drivers for early domestication can better be understood by looking for parallel processes in the wild. He suggests that the ecological processes that drove early domestication can be identified in anthropogenic habitat islands today (such as city parks and deforested landscapes), as well as on oceanic islands.

Robert N. Spengler (ISAW Visiting Research Scholar 2016-17) directs the ERC-funded Fruits of Eurasia Domestication and Dispersal (FEDD) project. He also leads the Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution Research Group (DAE) and oversees the paleoethnobotany laboratory at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. He is the co-PI on the Arcadia Fund project, Mongolian Archaeological Project: Surveying the Steppe (MAPSS). He supervises a team of postdocs spanning a range of methods across the archaeological sciences, and he oversees research projects across Central Eurasia in more than ten countries, stretching from Mongolia to Pakistan.

For the past two decades, Dr. Spengler has studied the archaeobotany of Central Asia through projects at over two dozen archaeological sites. His research agenda explores how the Silk Road shaped the foods we eat today and covers the original domestication and dispersal of many of the most important crops in the ancient world. Over the past few years, he has turned his research more towards evolutionary ecology, focusing on the ways that humans have and continue to drive the evolution of the organisms around them. Dr. Spengler has authored or coauthored more than 100 scholarly articles, many in top peer-reviewed journals. His first book, Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Food We Eat, was published by the University of California Press in 2019. His second book and the point of departure for this lecture is Nature’s Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity, published May 2025 by the University of California Press. For more information on the team and their research see: spenglerlab.com.

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

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Contact

David M. Ratzan, dr128@nyu.edu.