The Accidental Discovery of Planting
When bread was discovered – even the early dense and unleavened loaves – it must have seemed like a miracle food. What had been useless wild grasses that had only been good for grazing, now offered an entire meal in a single lump. It meant the territory where those wild grasses grew could now sustain more people than had hitherto been imagined. Initially, wild wheat and barley seeds were simply collected while in season and taken back to temporary campsites. Over the years, some of those gathered seeds inevitably fell near those campsites. They seeded and transformed the vicinity into new and increasingly denser wheat or barley fields. Eventually, somebody figured out the link between dropping some seeds on the earth, and the emergence some months later of new plants with many more seeds.
Thus was born farming. An added incentive to tend the miracle wild grasses was the durability of their seeds: once gathered, a kernel of wheat, for example, could last for years. That was way longer than most other hunter-gatherer dietary staples, such as meat, fish, or fruits, which had to be consumed soon after they were collected, or they would spoil. So people began to till, plant, and weed, as part-time farmers to raise enough grain to supplement their hunter-gatherer diet. Over the generations, the farming that had started as a part time gig for the hunter-gatherers who had first discovered its secrets, eventually became a full-time occupation for their descendants.
