How did wild wheat become a crop?

Wild wheat became a crop through a long, slow change in which people gathered wild grain, then cultivated it, while the plants slowly developed the traits of domesticated crops. Wheat was one of eight early crops of West Asia known as the founder crops: three cereals (emmer wheat, einkorn wheat and barley), four pulses (lentil, pea, chickpea and bitter vetch), and flax. They were among the first domesticated plants in the world, and they were domesticated between 10,500 and 7,500 years ago.

Grain was not a sudden discovery. Hunter-gatherers harvested the wild ancestors of these crops for millennia, perhaps as early as 23,000 years ago, though they were only a minor part of the diet. At Gilgal I in Israel, archaeologists found a granary with thousands of wild barley grains: cereal cultivation before domestication. Even after cultivation began, the founder crops were not favoured over wild plants, and it took at least a thousand years of what scholars call pre-domestication cultivation before they became staple foods.

What changed in the plant? Wild einkorn wheat sheds its grain when ripe. Domestic einkorn has ears that do not shatter without pressure, which makes it dependent on humans for dispersal and reproduction. Wild barley has a brittle rachis, the stalk that holds the grains, and domestication produced non-brittle forms, then naked and six-rowed ones.

Cereals suited early farmers: they could be easily cultivated in open fields, were highly nutritious and could be stored for long periods. Their wild ancestors are also self-pollinating, which made them easier to domesticate. Scholars still debate how neat the 'founder' story really is.