The earliest servant

The first plant pressed into human service is probably not the one you’re thinking of.

Our consultants are bread-bakers.  It is something of a point of pride for them to mix the flour, water, yeast, salt, etc. and go through the procedure of turning out homemade bread.  It is actually not hard (they say), though it does take time and knowing what dough feels like when it’s ready.

The really magical thing in the whole process is the yeast.  When properly handled, it’s the yeast that turns a dull, thick mass of dough into a light, airy sponge-like crumb that’s a pleasure to bite into.  But what is yeast?  It’s a single-celled plant.  Nowadays it comes in small packets or jars as a granular powder.  It can live in this dormant state for a long time (in our experience, well past the printed expiration date), and begins to do its work when exposed to warm water.  In bread, it turns sugars and starches into bubbles of carbon dioxide, and the bread rises.  If the process is stopped partway, the result is ethyl alcohol or acetic acid, and one gets beer or vinegar.  This fermentation has been applied to many things in many contexts, from tea to kimchi; we won’t attempt even to mention them here.

It struck us that yeast must be the first plant domesticated by humans.  A short bit of research showed that it was in use before 11,000 BCE, and so might indeed be roughly coeval with the domestication of the dog (“our first camp-follower” in one scientist’s description).  That’s well before agriculture and the domestication of wheat.  Now, yeast is pretty much everywhere, and sourdough bread uses whatever is in the local air; that’s what gives the variation in flavor, which can be interesting.  So it’s possible that at first humans only used wild yeast.  But even a sourdough cook captures the wild sort after the first batch, and from there it’s only a step to selective breeding.

So the first domesticated plant was captured before the end of the last Ice Age.  There is a great irony here.  In Old Town Alexandria, there are signs here and there of a horse-drawn past, but horses (domesticated maybe 4000 BCE) themselves are gone.    There are many dogs, but none (we’re pretty sure) are used to hunt down prey, with the possible exception of a few retrievers.  Meanwhile, the oldest domesticated plant is still used daily by bakers, doing what it was originally employed to do.