Flora maps 105 plants, crops, and botanical traditions across 12,000 years of human history — from the first domesticated grains of the Fertile Crescent to the global seed sovereignty movement, from Ayurvedic rasayanas to the Green Revolution.
Every plant has an origin point, a domestication or first-use date, and a full profile across 20 analytical lenses: botany, chemistry, ecology, medicine, food, colonialism, genetics, toxicology, and more. The timeline scrubs from 10,000 BCE to the present. Plants appear on the map at their geographic centre of domestication or first significant use.
Dispersal Chains trace how individual plants — cotton, cinnamon, rubber, coca, teff — travelled across the world through trade, colonialism, and migration, remaking economies and empires in their wake. Twenty chains cover routes from the Columbian Exchange to the Silk Road to the Slave Trade botanical corridor.
Origins mode groups plants by their primary domestication region across 12 centres: Fertile Crescent, Mesoamerica, Indian Subcontinent, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, Andean South America, Southeast Asia, and more — revealing the unequal geography of agricultural invention.
What-If asks: what if maize had never reached Europe? What if quinine had stayed in the Andes? What if the potato blight had hit a world without the crop at all?
Herstory surfaces the women who shaped plant knowledge across 42 entries — from Tu Youyou (artemisinin, Nobel 2015) and Barbara McClintock (maize genetics, Nobel 1983) to the anonymous Totonac women who developed vanilla cultivation, Mrs. Hutton whose foxglove remedy became digitalis, and the unnamed Khorasan women who have hand-harvested saffron at dawn for a thousand years.
Flora is part of The Pangea Project — a collection of single-file interactive atlases covering every domain of human knowledge.
© Polyglyph Analytica · pangea