Little is known about oats prior to the time of Christ. Their history is rather obscure. Because there are so many species and subspecies, identification of old remains is quite difficult. It is likely that the plants origins are in Asia Minor, where most subspecies grow alongside each other today. They were not domesticated as early as wheat or barley and probably persisted as a weed in other cereals for hundreds of years before being cultivated on it's own. Some of the oldest known oats were found in egyptian tombs dating to the 12th Dynasty, around 4000 years ago, but were probably weeds rather than cultivated crops. The oldest known cultivated oats were found in caves in Switzerland, dating to the Bronze age, around 3000 years ago.
It is only relatively recently that most people have begun to appreciate the qualities of oats. Ancient Greeks and Romans thought oats were nothing more than diseased wheat. The Romans used it only as fodder for horses and looked down upon the "oat eating barbarians" to the north. Barbarians like the Picts of ancient Scotland, who they never managed to conquer, despite trying for 300 years. Or the tribes of Germania who eventually toppled the West Roman Empire. Perhaps the world would be a different place today if the Romans had eaten their porridge. Samuel Johnson (1709-1791) defined oats in his dictionary as "Eaten by people in Scotland, but fit only for horses in England." To which his companion and biographer, the Scotsman James Boswell retorted "Thats why England has such good horses and Scotland has such fine men!"
The modern oat, known scientifically as Avena Sativa, draws its ancestry from the wild red oat and is grown mainly in Europe and North America. These areas have the cool, moist climate to which oats are best adapted. The largest commercial producers of oats are Russia, Canada, U.S.A., Poland and Finland. Perhaps no other country uses oats as much in their cropping system as Scotland.