The Uses of Hevea for Food in Relation to Its Domestication

The domestication of plants involves many factors about which there is little direct information and rarely can all of the possible factors concerning seed and plant distribution be accurately reconstructed.

Abstract

The domestication of plants involves many factors about which there is little direct information.Many of our most useful plants originated so long ago that we do not know their exact geographical origin or the plant or plants from which they were derived.Modern man, in his short span of keeping accurate records, can turn to few examples which offer the complete history of the domestication of a plant.Hevea is one plant which is being domesticated in a modern world by reason of its recent value as the world's most economical rubber producer.Its history is so short as scarcely to have changed the plant from its role as a wild jungle tree; yet it will serve as an example from which we may gain further insight into ancient plant domestication.How do plants become domesticated?To the uninitiated this question may seem too simple for serious consideration.But if it is so simple why are our best research men still in a controversial quandry regarding the origin of maize and most of our other cereals?We may say that plants become domesticated by man through countless generations of cultivation and conscious or unconscious selection of the best-yielding or most adaptive individuals for further propagation.As far as it goes, this may be true but it does not take into account the effects that wild forage animals may have had upon domestication.Little is known of the effect of gradual and catastrophic changes in ecology caused either by man or nature.Seldom can all of the possible factors concerning seed and plant distribution be accurately reconstructed.We must contend with such difficult factors as longpast chance hybridizations and mutations in a plant's history of domestication.The domestication of a wild plant is brought about by its being taken from its native habitat and reproduced for successive generations under man-modified conditions.Some species have been cultivated in different regions for different reasons at different times.What has happened when two or more of these closely related strains have been brought together?Evidence of such appears in maize literature (Anderson, '46).There are distinct strains of flax, one for seed oil, the other for fibre, certainly an important factor to be considered.The nature of a wild plant may become so changed through the long and complicated process of domestication that it can no longer survive without the aid of man.What would become of the domesticated plants which must rely on man for survival and without which man could not survive?