Rather Than Humans Domesticating Wheat, Wheat Might Have Domesticated Humans
In his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, historian Yuval Harari advances the argument that when it came to our main staple crops such as wheat and rice, it was actually the plants that domesticated humans, not the other way around. Taking wheat as an example, and examining 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 an evolutionary time scale – it was growing all over the world. Few if any species have ever achieved such growth within such a short time.
Wheat went from insignificant to globe spanning ubiquitous by manipulating humans. A species that had been living a relatively easy hunter gatherer life, until, about 10,000 years ago, it started investing more and more time and effort into cultivating wheat. Within a few millennia, humans around the world were spending most of their time from sunrise to sunset caring for wheat plants.
It was no easy task, as wheat is pretty finicky. Wheat was thirsty, so humans had to lug water or dig channels to bring water to it. Wheat was defenseless against critters that liked eating it, so humans defended it against rabbits, locusts, and deer. Wheat likes nutrients, so humans collected animal feces to scatter it over wheat fields. Wheat got sick, so humans had to keep a constant watch for blight and worms. Wheat does not like sharing its space with other plants, so humans spent hours stooping over wheat fields to remove weeds. Wheat does not like rocks or pebbles, so humans wrecked their backs clearing wheat fields.
Over millions of years, our bodies had evolved to climb trees or chase after gazelles in the African Savannah, not to bend over wheat fields to clear, weed, hoe, and water them, or perform many of the other myriad tasks associated with caring for that plant. Yet, wheat convinced us to do just that, and accept the resultant hernias, slipped disks, plus neck, knee, back, and foot pains as an acceptable price to pay in order to cultivate that plant.
Seen from the above perspective, the argument that it was wheat that actually domesticated humans, not humans who domesticated wheat, does not seem so farfetched. The very word “domesticate” is derived from the Latin root domus, or house: it was wheat that convinced our ancestors to give up hunter gathering, and settled down in houses near their farms so they could be closer to wheat.