this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Was ancient wheat the same as wheat today or was it selectively pollinated to get what we have now?
Modern wheats are different, but so are modern humans.
There's degrees of difference. Wheat goes through a new generation every year. Faster if you have a greenhouse. People go through a new generation every few decades. Wheat can thus change 20-30 times faster than people.
A century is, at minimum, 100 different "iterations" of the wheat genome. A century is ~3 "iterations" of humans.
Human selection of wheat would probably converge, as in humans would keep selecting the best wheat until it reaches some kind of optimal, steady state, then it would change slower as the selection process would be more about preserving the state.
How have humans changed.
Farming was a monumental change in human lifestyle, and has a whole host of genetic legacy.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151123202631.htm
It's been selected for some 5k years, give or take. One study found out that, starting from wild wheat, it'd take roughly 30 years to fully domesticate the crop. Bananas, maize, soy, almond and others that we eat are also very different from their wild variants