Sure, it may be that
some wild varieties of seeds are nutritious and relatively easy to utilize; however, Pye is not convinced that this applies for
all varieties, he points out many problems not least of which is the fact that some of these domesticated species have no obvious ancestor (man is one example, even Darwin observed that man was a kind of domesticated animal).
We should remember that our ancestors 10,000 ago were just as smart as we are today. They lacked only formal education and the history of prior discovery that we have. They would have put considerable thought into their sources of food and later their crops as this was literally a matter of life and death. I agree that the process of converting wild plants into domesticated crops is dauntingly complex requiring drastic and multiple genetic changes. I am not yet convinced that it could not have been achieved by sustained and selective breeding over a 5,000 year window.
This feat was achieved numerous times in eight different geographic areas with many different plant varieties, and "Once the advantages of growing these 'new technology' seeds was apparent, wild harvesting (and thus the possibility of domestication) of other equally promising species effectively ended", so to think that this happened independently and with numerous wild species throughout man's history is really stretching credulity. The odds of a beneficial mutation are already astonishingly small; this definitely sounds like another Darwinian "just-so story".
This feat of domesticating plants at some point in the future was not a "life and death" matter because in fact "hominids were able to survive for around one million years because they could successfully forage".
There is likewise no arguing the fact that nearly all modern domesticated plants appeared between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago and since then there have been few new staple crops. However, this could also be explained by the fact that perhaps it takes two to three thousand years of dedicated and selective breeding to achieve the large changes that we see. Such a process may be very labor intensive requiring detailed examination of each and every plant every single generation with decisions made regarding which plants to use the following generations. It would have to be sustained over generations and this level of vigilance would only occur if existence itself depended on it. Once success was achieved with a few crops it would be inefficient to repeat the process from scratch with new plants when better results would be achieved by building on past success for the reasons outlined in my post above.
"This level of vigilance would only occur if existence itself depended on it"
But CoinCube, there is no way for early man to know that existence itself depended on his long-term experimental breeding program. Many groups of people in eight different geographic areas would ALL have had to know this fact. Then, once the plants were domesticated all of the world's people would have had to forget this fact and stop passing it down through oral traditions.
Yes changing wild plants into their current highly optimized crops required modifications of entire suites of genes. Yes it would be very difficult to accomplish even today if we tried to repeat the feet. However, the time scales involved here are vastly different. For ancient man we are talking about multiple thousands of years to achieve results. That is a very different undertaking than trying to repeat that multi thousand year process in a year or two.
Well, we can agree that 5k years is different from 2 years, but take a look at the wild rye in Russia; they have been trying for 150 years to make a notable change in the plant and it still has not yet appeared; this is already an entire human generation. I can tell that you have no evidence that a multi-thousand year breeding operation will do any better a job than a 150-year operation. You are merely repeating a dogma advanced by the Darwinian theory that is now under scrutiny. Furthermore, if we look at cheetahs, as mentioned in Pye's article, we are forced to conclude that the fact that they are all genetically identical indicates that even a multi-thousand year breeding operation does not necessarily result in ANY changes at all.
Even if early humans were smarter than us (see their Ancient Stone Tech), it is not likely that they would labor at something like this for generations with little reward and succeed in such rapid time; it is implied that the alleles were selected with expert precision despite the inability of early man to examine anything more than the plant's phenotype: "early farmers seem to have selected domestication-gene alleles that are insensitive to genetic background and to the environment.
This process would have been slow, unrewarding and difficult to understand, because the effects of gene variants on the plant weren't stable. "
OK, so there are a lot of miracles involved, but that is basically what Darwinian theory demands from its believers: Just believe in the pre-existing freak beneficial mutations (they are just waiting to be activated by a clever breeder), the intelligence of early man (who is globally engaged in long-term experimental biology), add time and luck as "fudge factors" due to the lack of hard evidence and voila! Any trained Darwinist can now EASILY see how humans would have done this without ever remembering that they were smart enough to do so!
"But once sensitive alleles had been replaced with robust ones, breeders would have been able to exert strong selection pressure on plant traits, shaping them much more easily than before, and the pace of domestication would have picked up."
This implies that there was actually a chance that such complex manipulations of nature
could be carried out by primitive yeomen in eight geographical areas over 5,000 years. This strains credulity because, in each case, in each area, someone actually had to look at a wild progenitor and imagine what it could become, or should become, or would become. Then they somehow had to ensure that their vision would be carried forward through countless generations that had to remain committed to planting, harvesting, culling and crossbreeding wild plants that [typically] put no food on their tables during their lifetimes, but which might feed their descendants in some remotely distant future.