Did We Domesticate Wheat, or Did Wheat Domesticate Us?
In his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, historian Yuval Noah Harari advances a provocative argument about our main staple crops such as wheat and rice. To wit, that it was actually the plants that domesticated humans, not the other way around. Take wheat, for example, and examine it from the perspective of the basic evolutionary criterion of survival and reproduction. Wheat was just a wild grass confined to a small range in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. Within a few millennia – a blink of an eye in evolutionary time scales – it was growing all over the world.
Few species have ever achieved such growth within such a short time. Wheat went from insignificant to globe-spanning ubiquitous by manipulating humans. Humanity had been living a relatively easy hunter-gatherer life until, about 10,000 years ago, it began to invest more and more time and effort into wheat cultivation. Within a few millennia, humans around the world were spending most of their time from sunrise to sunset to care for wheat plants. As seen below, it was no easy task, as wheat is pretty finicky.
