What is "cereals"

Usage examples of "cereals".

Many Fertile Crescent plants, especially species of cereals and pulses, have adapted in a way that renders them useful to humans: they are annuals, meaning that the plant itself dries up and dies in the dry season.

The same may have been true on the Atlantic coast of Europe, where local hunter-gatherers apparently adopted Southwest Asian sheep and cereals over the course of many centuries.

In contrast, food production was adopted piecemeal in southwestern Europe (southern France, Spain, and Italy), where sheep arrived first and cereals later.

For instance, climate changes at the end of the Pleistocene in the Fertile Crescent greatly expanded the area of habitats with wild cereals, of which huge crops could be harvested in a short time.

Those wild cereal harvests were precursors to the domestication of the earliest crops, the cereals wheat and barley, in the Fertile Crescent.

All these techniques, though developed for the exploitation of wild cereals, were prerequisites to the planting of cereals as crops.

Compared with cereals and legumes, they had the drawback of not starting to yield food until at least three years after planting, and not reaching full production until after as much as a decade.

In particular, the Fertile Crescent's wheat and barley exemplify the class of crops termed cereals or grains (members of the grass family), while Fertile Crescent peas and lentils exemplify pulses (members of the legume family, which includes beans).

As a result, cereals today account for over half of all calories consumed by humans and include five of the modern world's 12 leading crops (wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum).

In other areas, though, that role of cereals was taken over or shared by roots and tubers, which were of negligible importance in the ancient Fertile Crescent and China.

Those dozen blockbusters are the cereals wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum.

But many of the big seeds, notably those of the annual cereals and pulses, are edible by humans.

Experimental studies in which botanists have collected seeds from such natural stands of wild cereals, much as hunter-gatherers must have been doing over 10,000 years ago, show that annual harvests of up to nearly a ton of seeds per hectare can be obtained, yielding 50 kilocalories of food energy for only one kilocalorie of work expended.

By collecting huge quantities of wild cereals in a short time when the seeds were ripe, and storing them for use as food through the rest of the year, some hunting-gathering peoples of the Fertile Crescent had already settled down in permanent villages even before they began to cultivate plants.

Of the three selfer cereals among them-- einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, and barley--the wheats offered the additional advantage of a high protein content, 8-14 percent.