A wild form of wheat called emmer wheat was one of the first plant species that humans domesticated. Emmer is not grown widely today, but gave rise to the durum wheat used for pasta and hybridized with another grass to make bread wheat, so its domestication was an important step in the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. While the archaeological record suggests that cultivation began in the southern Levant region bordering the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea around 9,500 years ago, genetic studies point to an origin in the northern region of the Fertile Crescent, in what is now Turkey. To clarify emmer's origins, researchers screened 189 types of wild and domesticated wheats and used the more that 1 million genetic variations that they identified to piece together the genetic relationships between different kinds of wheat.