In the 1750s, the explorer and surveyor Christopher Gist, traveling near the Ohio River in what later became western West Virginia, wrote in his journal of " Indian old fields . " He described " large meadows, fine clover Bottoms & spacious Plains covered with wild Rye ".
12.
There is early evidence for conscious cultivation and trait selection of plants by pre-Neolithic groups in Syria : grains of rye with domestic traits have been recovered from Epi-Palaeolithic ( c . 11, 050 BCE ) contexts at Abu Hureyra in Syria, but this appears to be a localised phenomenon resulting from cultivation of stands of wild rye, rather than a definitive step towards domestication.
