Practice question · Multiple choice
How did wheat become domesticated?
Hints
- Wild wheat explodes when ripe to scatter its seed.
- Which heads does a sickle collect, and what happens to those seeds?
Show the answer
B. Sickle harvesting selected for non-shattering mutants
Why
A mutant head that fails to shatter is an evolutionary dead end in the wild, until a human with a sickle collects precisely the intact heads and replants them. Within centuries the field is full of a plant that cannot reproduce without you. Nobody decided; the sickle decided.
Practise The Neolithic Revolution
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More questions on The Neolithic Revolution
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