Bread shaped human civilization. It provided the delicious doughy calories that energised the populations of some of the first ancient cities. Ten thousand years later this iconic crop helps to sustain a global population of eight billion.
A remarkable new study has provided compelling evidence as to how it was made possible, revealing the secret that made bread wheat one of the most successful crops on the planet while many others have disappeared or remained in local obscurity.
“Our findings shed new light on an iconic event in our civilisation that created a new kind of agriculture and allowed humans to settle down and form societies,” said Professor Brande Wulff, a wheat researcher at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) and one of the lead authors of the study which appears in Nature.
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