Prehistoric hunter-gatherers ate fruit, berries and nuts, so how did early farmers decide to cultivate grain?
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They didn’t spend their whole lives screwing in caves and picking berries. I’d imagine they had plenty of time to experiment and find ways to save labour, tell bullshit stories around a campfire that morphed into religions, etc.
James Michener explains this in one of his novels. Can’t remember which one.
Also, there’s a pretty good explanation of this in “Guns, Germs & Steel” by J. Diamond if memory serves.
Prehistoric hunter-gatherers made use of every kind of plant in their environment, including cereal grasses if they were available. We know that hunter-gatherers living in Europe ground grain into flour [as far back as 32,000 years ago](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/14/440292003/paleo-people-were-making-flour-32-000-years-ago). We know that hunter-gatherers in Australia regularly gathered grains to make flour even though they didn’t farm. Grains would have been an especially valuable food source to hunter-gatherers because they were storable, and could be processed into a wide variety of foods (including beer). In fact, granaries have been found that predate agriculture, which means wild grains were being harvested and stored long before farming. There is evidence of small-scale farming [as far back as 23,000 years ago in Israel](https://www.sci.news/archaeology/science-farming-ohalo-ii-israel-03052.html)
Anthropologists today don’t really like the term hunter-gatherer very much. They prefer to refer to a *foraging spectrum*. This includes a range of getting food from both wild and cultivated food sources. So the question really is why they moved on the spectrum from mostly wild food sources to mostly domesticated. The answer is much debated, but it certainly has to do with a combination of climate and increasing population. Studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers have shown they know how to grow crops, they just have no incentive since they can procure everything they need directly from nature because their numbers are so small.
There were probably several experiments in growing food in previous eras, but the climate was too variable, cool and arid for cultivation of cereals–or anything else–to be viable for very long. That previous climate period, known as the *Pleistocene*, meant that we couldn’t have started farming earlier even if we wanted to. That all changed once we entered the current climate period, known as the *Holocene*. This has led [some researchers](http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/AgOrigins_2_12_01.pdf) to speculate that farming was “impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene.”
The first agricultural technique was probably something called *flood retreat* agriculture. In this technique, seeds are sown on the ground that has been naturally disturbed by flooding. This is one reason why the first agrarian civilizations developed in river valleys all over the world. These societies were able to support more people, and over thousands of years these larger populations pushed all other lifeways (including modern hunter-gatherers) aside.
Increasing populations then became dependent on cereal grains and their associated products (bread, porridge, gruel, beer) to survive and keep large numbers of people alive. Because they ripen above ground at the same time, they made taxation easier. It’s also a tempting target for other societies to raid, including nomadic pastoralists. And because farming is so laborious, it provided an incentive for slavery, which is a negative for most hunter-gatherer groups (since you have to gather enough food to feed yourself and your slaves.) Hence the subsequent rise of states and cities, and everything else.
The climate dried, and many of the said fruits, vegetables and nuts became much less common. People went to where the water was, and on the banks of rivers they found the grains. This would not have happened all at once, of course, but it would have been a gradual migration of populations from one lifestyle to another.
When humans were still hunter gatherers, they basically foraged for food and hunted. It was when humans discovered the cycle of seasons and that during certain seasons, they noticed there was an abundance of food they can harvest. They took this knowledge and settled near riverbeds where they can irrigate the crops and cultivate grains. And that’s how civilization started really. It’s called the agricultural revolution.
Because there is a finite amount of berries and nuts in an area and it can only support a certain amount of people that is why they were always moving, chasing their food supply. As soon as they either accidentally or intentionally discovered how to grow grain, a renewable food source that can be grown to scale, they were able to settle down and increase the amount of people in the tribe due to the increase in food
Pre-historic hunter-gatherers ate absolutely anything they could get into their mouths, assuming it didn’t poison them (and sometimes even then).
I guarantee they also ate the mature seed-heads for the grasses and chenopods that eventually became domestic cereal/pseudocereal crops.
Somebody probably just noticed eventually that some grasses regrew vigorously if you dropped the seeds in the right type of location after you picked them, and then you could come back at the end of the summer and there’d be 10x as much as you dropped, that you could then pick and keep handy over the winter.
They’d collect grain as well. Grind it up with water, make some porridge and coalcakes (basically cooked balls of unleavened dough).
As for how grain cultivation started, it was pretty easy. People could carry grain in woven baskets. That means that a few seeds could fall out as people travelled.
The routes your gatherers traveled on would start to have wheat grow, which led to people learning how plants grew. They didn’t magically appear. They had babies like you and me. Their seeds touch the ground, and they grow.
When people realised they could choose where those babies grew, we started the agricultural revolution.
Beer.
There is good evidence that they discovered beer and then started farming. The rather obvious conclusion is that they may have settled down to ensure they had their beer.
We are discussion the domestication of wild grains. One of the primary requirements for any kind of domestication is a fast reproduction cycle. Grains grow quickly, can be harvested in bulk, and take quickly to hybridization. It can essentially be done on an ad hoc basis (like many comments here mention) by armature growers with foundational knowledge about “why” it works.
It is a great leap from scattering gathered grain in a plot of earth to the planting and cultivation of orchards for fruit or nuts. It takes the investment of generations to turn treeborn foodstuffs into something that is economical from a sheer resource and calorie standpoint.
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