Jim Worstell wrote
Actually bread wheat and spelt are the same species, both Triticum
aestivum.
You may be thinking of emmer which has the same genomes as dicoccoides.
By the way, dicoccoides is a source of high protein genes. I've seen
lines as high as 30% protein.
Hi Folks
Just to enlarge on Jim's information a little I looked up my ancient
University notes and this is what I found:-
Like corn, none of the quite large number of species (races) of wheat
occur in the wild, but unlike corn which has no very close wild
realtion, there are two wild Triticum species, growing naturally in the
East Meditettanean area which are generally reckoned to have between
them given rise to all the cultivated forms.
Triticum aegilopoides. This species occurs mainly in the Balkans and
Asia minor. While the individual spikes on the flowering stem may be
two-flowered only one ever produces a grain.
It is thought that only one cultivated plant has ever arisen from this
species :-
T. monococcum (Small Spelt). This is not much of an improvement on the
wild species, having the single-grained spikes which shatter at
maturity, so gathering the grain is quite difficult and threshing to get
rid of the chaff even more so. It is also late ripening has a miniscule
yield and is poor for bread making. Not surprisingly it is not grown as
a crop any more, but was the common grain in the area of its parent in
prehistoric times (grains are for instance found in Swiss lake dwelling
sites).
Then second species is the important one in the story of wheat.
Triticum dicoccoides (Wild Emmer)
Occurs widely in the western Mediterranean stretching inland as far as
Iran.
as the name suggests each spiklet sets two grains.
It is though that all the differnt types of whaet we know today arose
from this species mainly by selection which quite unintentionally led to
polyploidy. For those not familar with this concept, the wild form is a
simple diploid, that is a plant whose cells contain just one set of
chromosomes from each parent, but in the case of wheat, in the most
useful of the resulting offspring, these have somehow become doubled
and even tripled so that for instance the common bread wheat (T.
aestivum) has no less than three double sets making it a hexaploid.
Polyploides can now be produced by breeders at will using certain
chemicals and other methods, but this was certainly not know in early
times. However they can also arise spontaneously due to some natural
influence and that is obvously what happened as the early farmers began
to select the best individuals from their crops for seed, starting no
doubt at the very beginning just growing the wild species deliberately
in little beds or fields and picking the best individuals as seed
parents each year. .
Nearly alway polyploides are stouter and higher-yielding thsn the
simple diploid, so farmers would have certainly noticed these
exceptional plants standing above the rest of the crop, and those with
any sense at all would have defintely selected their seed for planting,
so that in time they would have had some better-yielding forms often
with other advantages to improve theri crop in the next season.
You have to understand though that this was not modern purposful
breeding and the establishment of all the varous types of wheat
cultivated today took hundreds if not thousands of years of fairly
random and not aby any means alway successful selection (this si true of
course of the history of domestication of any plant in ancient times,
not just wheat)
--
Tony & Moira Ryan
Wainuiomata NZ,
where it's Summer in January and Winter in July.
