First, domesticated maize did not suppress the domestication of other plants. Central America had an amazing variety of domesticated plants: beans (several different kinds), chili peppers, tomatoes, squash, avocadoes, and sunflowers, among quite a few others.
Second, maize was not an ideal crop. It lacks certain amino acids which must be supplied by other domestcated plants. Amaranth, for example, does this, which is why it was also a staple of Mesoamerican agriculture. Maize also must be ground up to release its nutrients, although that’s pretty much true of wheat as well (wheat isn’t an ideal plant either.)
Third, initially maize was restricted in its growing area to tropical regions. It wasn’t until somewhere around 800 AD (give or take a couple centuries) that a variety was found that could tolerate the climate of what’s now the eastern US. Which was why civilizaton didn’t get going in that region until about then. For some reason, amaranth didn’t go along with maize to North America. Or at least I never heard of it; they always talk about the three staples of Native American agriculture as maize, beans and squash, all planted together.
I think if we just add a little qualifier: time, we can use 5 or 6 plants:
The 5 plants that changed the world … in the last 300 years: tea, potatoe, sugar cane, quinine, cotton.
The 6 plants that started civilization … some thousands and more years ago: grains in the fertile crescent plus rice in Asia plus maize in America
The 12 plants that enabled the pre-step of civilization … linnen and related materials that allowed building of houses, baskets, and clothes
Maybe 12 plants for tools, to separate the different trees for bows and spears and hoes for digging
6 plants that started exploration and trade … the main spices. Since pepper and clove and safran and … were all worth their weight in gold, I’d group the main spices of that time together. All of them influenced trade majorly.
6 or 12 plants that influenced health: modern medicine plants, starting with willow bark and opium (back in Arabic days for surgery), and some others.
“Paper” derives from “papyrus” (as in “what the ancient Egyptians wrote on”), which is made from plants. Not woody ones, true, but wood-pulp paper wasn’t possible until we had large sources of HCl; cotton and linen are also plants and are used to make paper (either directly or as rags).
I just watched the first 2/3 of a show called “History of the World in 2 Hours.” It offers a few nuggets of unconventional analysis, one of which was that the organism that has had the most profound impact on humanity is grass.
Firstly, the development of grasslands around the world coincides, as figure9 posted, with hominids descending from trees. Hominid bipedalism, a precursor to the development of technology by freeing our hands, may have its start in the need to keep the head elevated in tall grasslands to spot predators.
Also, wheat, rice, barley…all the cereals are grass, and those are the staples of modern human diet. So grass may be “responsible” for bipedalism, agriculture, technology, and civilization.
Opium, as mentioned already, seems tough to beat in the medical sphere. Used as an analgesic for 1000s of years, still today morphine derivatives remain the front line treatment for serious pain. So it’s not like its gone out of fashion, or has become just one of many medicines at our disposal. Even with their attendant problems we have yet to discover a better class of analgesic than the morphine alkaloids.
I’m going to nominate the bottle gourd. Its domestication predates food crops, livestock, dogs, and (most importantly) pottery. The bottle gourd was the only method early man had of transporting water. Therefore, he could not have spread so far and so quickly without it.
I highly recommend Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire to the OP. It focuses on 4 plants that humans cultivated over time to better fulfill basic human desires – apples for sweetness, pot for pleasure, tulips for beauty and potatoes for food.
I don’t even know where to start with this one, but let;s consider some of the more blindingly obvious problems:
Humans made it all the way to freakin’ Australia, Japan and Ireland without bottle gourds. So doesn’t that alone rather call into question the notion that “he could not have spread so far and so quickly without it”?
Early man had a vast number of ways of transporting water, most of them still in use today: ostrich/emu shells, wooden bowls, waterskins, animal intestines and bark canteens, to name just a few, have all been available since before we became human beings.
Grass isn’t a plant, it is at least three distinct familie. You might just as well nominate “trees” or “herbs”.
Cereals are not staples of the modern human diet. They may be staples of the industrial diet, but for most of history modern humans ate relatively little grass. The staple of the modern human diet was meat, followed by tubers, then fruit in that order.
Grasses are not in any conceivable way “responsible” for agriculture. Agriculture managed to get along quite fine without using grasses throughout Australasia, Polyneisa and South East Asia. These systems, based upon bananas, taro, sago and sweet potato, were *more *productive than grass based systems, and supported the highest pre-industrial population densities in human history.