Shortly after the cultivation of the first einkorn plant, the emmer variety of wheat, the natural offspring of parents einkorn and an unrelated wild grass, Aegilops speltoides or goatgrass, made its appearance in the Middle East.2 Goatgrass added its genetic code to that of einkorn, resulting in the more complex twenty-eight-chromosome emmer wheat. Plants such as wheat have the ability to retain the sum of the genes of their forebears.
