Mysterious Origins of Crops:
We
are told in our history and anthropological texts that
our fist civilizations were spawned on the heels of the
‘agricultural revolution, which occurred in major river
valleys. What the texts fail to tell us is that our
Stone Age predecessors did not harvest and eat the seeds
of wild grasses during their long sojourn through the
Paleolithic era. They were hunter-gathers who subsisted
on leafy greens and lean muscle meats. How come they
suddenly figured out how to domesticate and turn into
major food sources circa 5,000 BC?
This raises some obvious and very sticky questions
concerning the period of trial and error experimentation
and development that must have gone into domesticating
wild wheat into bread wheat and wild corn into the
domesticated variety.
Let us begin with the enigma of the modern corn plant.
The humble origin of corn remains mysterious because the
ancestral wild plant has never been located. It is an
established, scientific fact that corn is a cultigens, a
plant engineered by humans. This means that it has
become so altered by humans that it cannot reproduce
naturally and is entirely dependent upon man’s continued
cultivation. In short, it is now a manmade plant and has
been for some time. Scientists have not been able to
trace the lineage of corn to the ancestral wild plant.
How can this be if the ‘agricultural revolution’ only
occurred 7-8,000 years ago?
Corn is a form of wild grass, as are the majority of the
other major crop plants, there is no good reason for the
ancestral variety to have vanished and/or become
extinct. 10,000 years may seem like a long time in human
terms yet it is a very short time in terms of the
evolution and life span of a plant species. There are
ancient plants that have existed continuously for
hundreds of millions of years.
If you believe that our ancestors domesticated crop
plants, you have to start by assuming that people
without any agricultural experience were brilliant
enough to select and breed the best wild seed candidates
to turn into major cereal crops. It is a historical fact
that in spite of 5,000 years of continuous agricultural
development we have not genetically bred a new major
crop from a wild species. Just how ingenious were out
Stone Age predecessors who performed this agronomic feat
without any agricultural or genetic knowledge?
The most possible answer is they know genetics, and the
alien gods from outer space, taught them advanced
agriculture. It is written in Babylonian texts that
great alien beings from space taught people about
agriculture, house making, use of wheels, tanning of
leather, irrigation etc. We are told in our history and
anthropological textbooks that our fist civilizations
were spawned on the heels of the ‘agricultural
revolution, which occurred in major river valleys.
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