The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Agricultural Origins: Centers and Noncenters: Agriculture may originate in discrete centers or evolve over vast areas without definable centers.
Abstract
I propose the theory that agriculture originated independently in three different areas and that, in each case, there was a system composed of a center of origin and a noncenter, in which activities of domestication were dispersed over a span of 5,000 to 10,000 kilometers. One system includes a definable Near East center and a noncenter in Africa; another system includes a North Chinese center and a noncenter in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific; the third system includes a Mesoamerican center and a South American noncenter. There are suggestions that, in each case, the center and noncenter interact with each other. Crops did not necessarily originate in centers (in any conventional concept of the term), nor did agriculture necessarily develop in a geographical "center."
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Molecular Genetics of Plant Disease Resistance
Staskawicz, B. J., Ausubel, F. M., Baker, B. J., Ellis, J. G., & Jones, J. D. G. (1995) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.7732374 · Cited by 914
Cattle Before Crops: The Beginnings of Food Production in Africa
Marshall, F., & Hildebrand, E. (2002) · Journal of World Prehistory · doi:10.1023/a:1019954903395 · Cited by 445
Piperno, D. R. (2011) · Current Anthropology · doi:10.1086/659998 · Cited by 427
Multiregional Emergence of Mobile Pastoralism and Nonuniform Institutional Complexity across Eurasia
Frachetti, M. D. (2012) · Current Anthropology · doi:10.1086/663692 · Cited by 370
The role of the testa during development and in establishment of dormancy of the legume seed.
Smýkal, P., Vernoud, V., Blair, M. W., Soukup, A., & Thompson, R. D. (2014) · Frontiers in Plant Science · doi:10.3389/fpls.2014.00351 · Cited by 331
Metadata
- Authors
- Harlan, J. R.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 1971-10-29
- Volume
- 174
- Issue
- 4008
- Pages
- 468-474
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2043101617
- Cited by
- 745
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 6.82
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Agricultural Origins: Centers and Noncenters: Agriculture may originate in discrete centers or evolve over vast areas without definable centers. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.174.4008.468
- The paper
- Harlan, J. R. (1971). Agricultural Origins: Centers and Noncenters: Agriculture may originate in discrete centers or evolve over vast areas without definable centers. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.174.4008.468
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
