Prehistoric hunter-gatherers ate fruit, berries and nuts, so how did early farmers decide to cultivate grain?
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The book “Sapiens” goes into this in more detail, but the gist of it is that grains domesticated humans, and not the other way around.
Hunter gatherers would gather some grains (like wheat) as well. As they carried it around, they would inevitably drop some seeds (the grains) on their most walked paths, which caused grains to grow there. This caused humans to wander less… because grains were now growing where they already were. So humans began to wander less and less and instead built civilizations around those grains.
In the beginning, it was probably a poor choice. Building a diet over a single grain is much less healthy than the hunter gatherer lifestyle. It also required more work to tend to those plants, than to wander around and just pick what was available. But in the long haul, over 10,000-20,000 years, it led to modern civilization.
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