For years, scholars argued that the practices of cultivation and animal domestication were invented in one or two locations on Earth and then diffused from those centers of innovation. Genetic studies are now showing that many different groups of people in many different places around the globe learned independently to create especially useful plants and animals through selective breeding. Probably both independent invention and diffusion played a role in agricultural innovation. Sometimes the ideas of domestication and cultivation were relayed to new places. In other cases the farmers or herders themselves moved into new zones, taking agriculture or improvements such as new tools or new methods or new plants and animals with them.

5 What do genetic studies suggest about the theory that “cultivation and animal domestication were invented in one or two locations on Earth and then diffused from those centers of innovation”?

O The theory underestimates the speed at which cultivation and animal domestication were diffused.

O The theory underestimates the number of locations in which cultivation and animal domestication arose independently.

O The theory overemphasizes the importance of selective breeding in cultivation and animal domestication.

O The theory overemphasizes the importance of cultivation and animal domestication to some groups of people.