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Article: Cereal Grains
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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CEREAL GRAINS
Origins
Cereal grains are the seeds that come from grasses such as wheat, millet, rice, barley, oats, rye, triticale, sorghum, and maize (corn). About 80 percent of the protein and over 50 percent of the calories consumed by humans and livestock come from cereal grains. The United States is a major supplier of cereal grains to the rest of the world and some impoverished countries depend on gifts of both unmilled and processed grains from America to keep their people from starving.
Most archaeologists and paleo anthropologists agree that agriculture began around 10,000 b.c., when people near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia (later Iraq) settled into villages ...