The Vavilov centers of genetic diversity

ICARDA is located in the heart of an area which is the birthplace of agriculture, and of some of the world's greatest civilizations.The empires of Ebla, Assyria, Sumeria, Babylonia,and the Hittites held sway over this region of economic and strategic importance. Although there were many factors that contributed to the emergence of civilization in the area,there is little doubt that agriculture played a central role and encouraged the growth of long-distance trade.

The ICARDA region contains three of the eight centers of crop origin (see map) identified by Vavilov in the early part of the century.

Archaeological findings have shown that,some 10,000 years ago,barley, wheat, lentil, pea, flax, and vetch were all domesticated in the Fertile Crescent, an arc in the Near East that extends from Palestine through Syria and southern Turkey into Iraq and western Iran. Wheat and barley, together with domesticated sheep and goat, formed the basis of farming systems which evolved in the Fertile Crescent around 7000 BC and then spread quickly as a Neolithic agriculture package to other parts of West Asia, the Nile Valley, and the Balkans. Three millennia later, this wheat-and-barley Neolithic farming system provided food for people living in an extensive area of the Old World from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian subcontinent and from Scandinavia to the Nile Valley.

The Near East crop complex has made a significant contribution to feeding the human population in historical times as well as today. Of the world's 30 major crops, the Near East has contributed wheat, barley, pea, rapeseed, and wild races of rye and oats. Yet other crops, which have a regional importance in human food, include chickpea, lentil, and faba bean. Other valuable components of the human diet, such as olive, almond, pistachio, apple, apricot, peach, hazelnut, grape, quince, fig, date palm, cucumber, and melon also originated here.