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".
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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.
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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.
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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.
I question the implied assumption above that early humans needed to plan generations in advance achieving no reward to successfully domesticate plants. The correct question to ask in my opinion is:
1) Would ancient man have obtained a survival benefit in the cultivation and growing of the wild ancestors of today's modern crops.
If the answer is yes then the foundations of agriculture and plant domestication are set without any need for genetic mutation at all and that leads us to the second question:
2) Given the numbers of humans involved and the time frame in question is it reasonable to conclude that the genetic changes required to transform wild ancestors to modern crops could have taken place through selective breeding and spontaneous mutations.
This is the heart of the matter and I suspect it cannot be definitively answered from the data available. However, I do not feel Intervention Theory has proven it's case. I am skeptical of the following arguments for Intervention theory.
A) I am skeptical of the claim that it is impossible that these genetic changes occurred gradually over many generations of selective breeding. Indeed we have experiments showing impressive examples microevoluation (admittedly in bacteria) occur under selective pressure given sufficient numbers and time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8I would need better data to convince me that these changes could not have occurred via mutation and selective breeding.
B) I am skeptical of the argument that because we have had no major new plant domestication's in the last 5,000 years outside intervention must have been responsible. The article I cited upthread
http://phys.org/news/2014-04-genetic-tackles-mystery-domestications.htmlimplies that the initial genetic changes would by far be the most difficult and that once achieved further crop improvements would occur more quickly. If that is the case then farmers focusing on further improving plants already domesticated would out compete those experimenting with new crops once a critical threshold of improvement in a few staple crops was obtained. Perhaps it simply becomes economically unfeasible for early man to domesticate new crops from scratch once a few good staple crops have already been developed due to the large opportunity costs involved.
C) I am also skeptical of the argument that because the Russians have failed to cultivate a new form of wild rye over 150 years that it could not have been done in antiquity. I am unfamiliar the Russian research but have to wonder how much effort and diligence they are they really putting in compared to the efforts of antiquity. For the ancient farmer the success or failure of his crops determined if his children could eat or if they went hungry. He could be expected to very closely monitor each plant in his field and put tremendous thought and effort into every generation of seedlings in the hopes of being able to feed his family the following year. I cannot help but suspect that the efforts of antiquity would exceed that of well fed Russian academics who manage a small field of wild rye every so often in between other academic projects. The failure to introduce new changes from wild rye is certainly interesting. It calls for further research but I would not call it conclusive.
None of my arguments disprove Intervention Theory. Indeed it remains is entirely possible that Intervention Theory is true. However, in regards to ancient crops I do not yet feel a definitive case has been made. If there was an intervention we should see genetic changes to crops that vastly exceed the rate of change if these plants had be subjected to pressure via selective breeding alone. I would be interested to know if this is the case.