Prehistoric hunter-gatherers ate fruit, berries and nuts, so how did early farmers decide to cultivate grain?
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Humans have been around a LONG time, roughly 200,000 years. it fascinates me that 95% of our history there’s no record of and we have to guess. But these humans were as smart as us, just not educated.
A culture like the Natufians noticed a nice cave structure, moved in, and then took notice of the natural growth of wheat in the area. Someone gets creative to increase it.
Unlike most foods of the time, wheat specifically could be stored for long periods of time. So the invention of granaries.
So… hanging around for generations in one place, smart (but uneducated) people looking at the same vegetation year after year, “can we make more of it?”, “oh look we can store it!”, “oh we don’t have to hunt as much when we have these nice surpluses” “I wonder if there’s more stuff we can harvest?”
Not having to spend 24/7 in search of food allowed the development of other professions, which lead to bartering, trade, just yeah… all modern society shit.
Took about 190,000 years to get there though.
Fire’s a similarly huge advancement. That took about 80,000 years for us to figure out (in the same everyone has a cellphone now). But now the world can be navigated 24/7, a source of warmth from the elements, a means to keep predators away and cooked meat was about 60% more calorie nutritious (we could now hunt less with properly cooked food).
At that point humans are pretty much Apex Predator.
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