Barley is one of the world’s oldest cultivated plants, farmed for more than 10,000 years. Scientists have long believed it was domesticated in just one location. An international research team led by the IPK Leibniz Institute has revealed that modern barley has a “mosaic origin,” meaning it stems from several wild populations across the Fertile Crescent. The paper is published in the journal Nature.
Barley’s mosaic origin traced to five wild populations and millennia of human involvement
