The 15,000-year story of how grass seduced humanity into being its unwitting labor force—and the science behind it.
Domesticated crops were not human creations, and agriculture was not simply invented. As Robert N. Spengler shows, domestication was the result of an evolutionary process in which people played a role only unwittingly and as actors in a numberless cast that spanned the plant and animal kingdoms. Nature's Greatest Success is the first book to bring together recent scientific discoveries and fascinating ongoing research to provide a systematic account of not only how agriculture really developed but why.
Through fifteen chapters, this book dives deep into the complex processes that drove domestication and the various roles that plants and animals, including humans, played in bringing about those changes. At the intersection of popular history, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, Nature's Greatest Success offers a revolutionary account of humanity not at the apex of nature but deeply embedded in the natural world and the evolutionary processes that continue to guide it even today.
Robert N. Spengler III directs the Fruits of Eurasia: Domestication and Dispersal research project and leads the Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. He is author of the book Fruit from the Sands and has published dozens of scholarly articles while running research projects across Central Asia.
"A compelling case for decoupling domestication from the yoke of human dominance and intentionality and instead understanding it as a pervasive and ages-old coevolutionary process. Spengler integrates and updates archaeological and biological data and theory more successfully and comprehensively than anyone I have seen. Scholars reluctant to relinquish human agency as the force driving domestication may be persuaded that multispecies, mutualistic relationships at the core of modern agriculture were not only 'natural' as opposed to 'cultural' but arguably inevitable."—Gayle J. Fritz, Professor Emerita of Archaeology, Washington University in St. Louis
"This book marks a step change in our understanding of animal and plant domestication. Spengler's proposal of 'ecological release' as a universal driver of the domestication process is particularly exciting."—Glynis Jones, Fellow of the British Academy and Emeritus Professor of Archaeology, University of Sheffield
"The topic of domestication, much like domestication itself, is an ever changing and evolving one. In this comprehensive compendium of domestication science, Robert Spengler has made it possible for those in academia, agriculture, animal husbandry, and more to defer to one current and easy-to-access resource."—David Ian Howe, anthropologist and producer of the podcast Ethnocynology
512 pp.6 x 9Illus: 50 b/w figures, 4 tables
9780520435834$27.95|£24.00Paper
Sep 2026