Chapter 3 Domestication of the Triticeae in the Fertile Crescent Benjamin Kilian, Hakan ¨ Ozkan, Carlo Pozzi, and Francesco Salamini Abstract About 12,000 years ago, humans began the transition from hunter- gathering to a sedentary, agriculture-based society. From its origins in the Fertile Crescent, farming expanded throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, together with various domesticated plants and animals. Where, how and why agriculture originated is still debated. Progress has been made in understanding plant domestication in the last few years. New insights were obtained mainly due to (I) the use of comprehensive germplasm collections covering the whole distribution area for each species; (II) the comparison of many wild and domesticated accessions for each species; (III) the identification of the wild progenitor in the wild gene pool and its comparison with domesticate descen- dants; (IV) the use of molecular fingerprinting techniques at many loci and the access to new generation high-throughput sequencing technologies; (V) the identification and cloning of genes involved in domestication; and (VI) excava- tion campaigns. This chapter reviews the recent knowledge on wheat, barley and rye domestication in the Fertile Crescent and covers several issues concerning the molecular knowledge of the effects induced by domestication and breeding of these crops. Cereals provide more than 50% of the worldwide crop production and are important renewable resources for food, feed, and industrial materials (faostat.fao.org). The Triticeae tribe within the Pooideae subfamily of the grass family Poaceae includes the crop genera Triticum (wheat), Hordeum (barley) and Secale (rye). Wheat is the primary cereal of temperate regions and the staple food for about 40% of the world’s population. Globally, wheat is the second most widely grown crop, just recently B. Kilian (*) Institute of BotanyIII, Heinrich-Heine-Universita¨t Du¨ sseldorf, Universita¨tsstrasse 1, 40225 Du¨ sseldorf, Germany; Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Genebank/Genome Diversity, Corrensstrasse 3, 06466 Gatersleben, Germany; Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Carl-von-Linne´-Weg 10, 50829 K ¨oln, Germany e-mail: kilian@ipk-gatersleben.de C. Feuillet, G.J. Muehlbauer (eds.), Genetics and Genomics of the Triticeae, Plant Genetics and Genomics: Crops and Models 7, DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-77489-3_3, Ó Springer ScienceþBusiness Media, LLC 2009 81