First Farmers

Like a child who wants to know everything when the child is beginning to notice things around him and ask endless questions to his parents, you might also do the same.

In the natural world, sometimes you might ask, how did plants get its name and how did humans know if the plants are eligible to eat, use and so on and so forth, considering that farmers in those days does not have the technology that modern generation have now to test certain kinds of species. Life is a continuous learning process regardless of age, be it a child or an adult.

The first farmers did not simply take wild grasses and plant them in rows in their fields. They had to work hard to turn their wild species they found into true cereal crops. To begin with, they had to choose the plants that were the most suitable for food. In Europe and Asia, farmers chose grasses such as wheat and barley. Farmers in Eastern Asia grew millet, while Tropical African growers cultivated yarns. The first farmers in North America selected corn, while those in South America chose potatoes and another root vegetable, manioc.

Farmers watched for the individual plants that are strongest or biggest, like what American farmers do, they collected the seeds from plants yielding the biggest cobs, and sowed these, to produce a crop with larger cobs the next year..

Farmers in the Fertile Crescent had a different problem with their wheat. One species that grew well was wild einkorn wheat. But its seeds tended to break off and fall to the ground when they ripened, which made them difficult to harvest. Eventually, the farmers noticed that a few plants had seeds that did not fall so quickly, so they bred their crops from these. Soon they had developed a new species, domesticated eincorn wheat, with seeds that broke away only during threshing.

It's the same thing with their animals, they bred in a similar way. They select the beasts with the features they wanted and breeding from them. But the changes to the animal species were less dramatic than with the crops. Cattle were smaller than modern cows, and sheep and goats looked like the wild species.

Most early domestic animals were smaller than their wild cousins. Maybe, because farmers bred good-tempered, docile creatures that were less aggressive and easier to handle than wild animals. Farmers choose large specimens, they would have selected animals that produced the best-tasting meat or the highest yield of milk.

Gradually, the farmers built up knowledge and experience, and they must have discovered that the smaller animals often had the features they wanted.

I myself had a lot of questions looking for an answer about nature and how things came into being that is why I keep on finding the answers through reading especially in history. Knowing things around us and its existence broadens our knowledge and it's nice to be somebody who can participate and contribute something to any kind of topic under the sun.