Prehistoric hunter-gatherers ate fruit, berries and nuts, so how did early farmers decide to cultivate grain?

Question

Prehistoric hunter-gatherers ate fruit, berries and nuts, so how did early farmers decide to cultivate grain?

In: 12

Answer 1

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.