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I wanted to focus on the origins of domesticated plants and agriculture, which has a buried and unrecorded past of 10,000 years and more. Recent experience with Stone Age cultures of the Amazon basin and elsewhere has shown that such cultures have a sophisticated knowledge of plants for such purposes as food, medicine, and the tools and poisons used for hunting and fishing. Amerindian cultures improved a wide range of species by deliberate selection of the more productive and useful forms. However nowadays we have gone beyond the functional use of plants in a modern city.