The simple chickpea seems to hold the clue as to where agriculture originated some 10,000 years ago in the Middle East.

 The exact region in which agriculture began has been identified by a group of Israeli researchers -- including a member of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences -- as lying in the Fertile Crescent in an area that is now within southeastern Turkey and northern Syria.

 Their findings shed light not only on the origins of agriculture, but also suggest that Western civilization may have emerged from this region, as surplus food supplies led to the establishment, of large, organized settlements.
 The researchers, whose article on the subject appeared this month in Science magazine, are: Dr. Shahal Abbo of the Department of Field Crops, Vegetables and Genetics at the Hebrew University; Dr. Simcha Lev-Yadun of the Agricultural Research Organization of the Ministry of Agriculture; and Prof. Avi Gopher of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University.

  The Israeli researchers suggest in their article, that  botanical, genetic and archaeological evidence point to the cradle of agriculture as being located in a small core area within the Fertile Crescent near the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (in present day southeastern Turkey/northern Syria).
 They base this thesis on their studies of the domesticated varieties of crops grown in ancient times and their progenitors. Their findings reveal that the wild ancestors of all of the earliest, primary Neolithic crops grew together only in this Fertile Crescent region. The crops include two types of wheat, barley, lentils, peas and, chickpeas.
 The wild chickpea provides a convincing key to the researchers’ conclusions, as it is an extremely rare species in  southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. Dr. Abbo, an expert on the genetics of this crop claims. that had agriculture originated elsewhere, chickpeas would not have been domesticated as one of the first, or founder, crops.