Lost Plants Previously Humans’ Favorite Plants

One half of the total calories we eat from food come from three staple crops; corn, rice and wheat but it wasn’t always these three crops because people used to eat all types of things in the past such as sunflower even though we still get oil from its seeds but other crops that we consumed often in the past like that include maygrass, and knotweed. If you have heard those plants before.

A lot of crops used to be in humans good books in the past until they suddenly became forgetten and it wasn’t until recently that scientists are beginning to look for them and we refer to them as lost crops.

Those crops that were once domeaticated but are no longer currently and i mentioned a few previously but I do not know if you have heard of crops like Little barley, Sumpweed, and Pitseed Goosefoot. These are examples of such crops in addition to the once above. What you might see today are their wild relatives but they were at some point domesticated and archeologists discovered that the seeds of the domesticated ones were different from their wild relatives. They even found the seeds in human feces which is a sign that they were surely consumed at some point in time.

Flickr: lostinfog

Scientists who found some of these seeds in the 1930s dismissed them for reasons such as the size of the seeds saying they were too small for people to have cultivated them. Also the believe that agriculture started from a specific place made it looked impossible for people to have been cultivating the seeds as far back as the cave times. Another problem was the unavailability of techniques loke carbon dating, and people believed was wildspread thanks to corn.

Corn originated from Teosinte thanks to domestication which has now made a big difference in our world today. But while we celebrate Maize in agriculture, scientists have seen that it was not the only big breakthrough we had in agriculture. They found that the seeds of lost plants dated as far back as 3000 years ago which predates maize. Scientists have come to say that before maize, plants that were in abundant were the once eaten.

geograph

With this, we have learned that agriculture didn’t just come like a big bang theorem kind of thing, rather it was a gradual and diffused process and these lost plants have been out door to understanding our agricultural past and our agricultural future. So we could say that just as animals with more friendly traits such as wolves were tamed to become dogs so were plants that were more human-friendly and around humans were more likely to be domesticated.

Scientists were able to prove that wild seeds were able to become domesticated ones using the wild version of knotweed making it more easier to grow as a crop and not a wild specie and they found that plant with easy flexibility to changes in environment were easily domesticated.

It is no doubt that a lot of seed that we eat today are somewhat wild seeds before and were domesticated, making for abundant food but then why did these lost plants fall out of favor and choice, and is it possible that out plants of choices today can fall our of favor to also become lost seeds in years to come?

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^{For Further Reading}

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^{https://www.nature.com/articles/nplants201792
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0284136#sec014
https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/ethnobotany/food/index.shtml
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/10
https://theconversation.com/prehistoric-people-started-to-spread-domesticated-bananas
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/04/230410132158.htm
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12571-011-0140-5
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav8197
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/812451
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053019620961119
https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-ethnobiology/volume-39}