Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity

III Robert N Spengler

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Book cover for Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity
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Book cover for Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity
Image for variant 9780520435834

Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity

Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity

III Robert N Spengler

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Description
The 15,000-year story of how grass seduced humanity into being its unwitting labor force--and the science behind it.

Domesticated crops were not human creations, and agriculture was not simply invented. As Robert N. Spengler shows, domestication was the result of an evolutionary process in which people played a role only unwittingly and as actors in a numberless cast that spanned the plant and animal kingdoms. Nature's Greatest Success is the first book to bring together recent scientific discoveries and fascinating ongoing research to provide a systematic account of not only how agriculture really developed but why.

Through fifteen chapters, this book dives deep into the complex processes that drove domestication and the various roles that plants and animals, including humans, played in bringing about those changes. At the intersection of popular history, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, Nature's Greatest Success offers a revolutionary account of humanity not at the apex of nature but deeply embedded in the natural world and the evolutionary processes that continue to guide it even today.

About the Author

Robert N. Spengler III directs the Fruits of Eurasia: Domestication and Dispersal research project and leads the Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. He is author of the book Fruit from the Sands and has published dozens of scholarly articles while running research projects across Central Asia.

Critical Reviews

"An astute overview of a burning historical controversy."-- "Kirkus Reviews"

"Spengler (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology) examines the mutualistic relationships between humans and plants, using modern examples from anthropogenic landscapes to understand ancient patterns and the earliest traits of domestication. . . . This would be an ideal text for an ecology or evolution seminar or a discussion course."

-- "CHOICE"

"In Nature's Greatest Success, Robert Spengler argues that domestication began not as a conscious human endeavor, but an emergent evolutionary process shaped by the removal of ecological pressures by human activity."
-- "Eurasia Review"

"Spengler explore[s] how human beings unwittingly contribute to plant and animal change and survival. . . . [B]rilliant."-- "First Things"

"Nature's greatest success is . . . replete with evident great scholarship on the part of the author."

-- "Plant Cuttings"

"A magisterial presentation.of a very particular view of plant domestication. The definition of domestication is controversial. . . . If you have any interest in domestication or early agriculture, it will be essential for you to read this book--even if ultimately you do not accept all of the author's hypotheses and beliefs."

-- "Ethnobotany and Economic Botany"

Publishing Information

Publisher: University of California Press
Pub date: 2026-09-08
Length: 512 pages

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