the cultivation of wild cereals dates back at least to 10,000 BC.35 Yet in these same regions, the biological process of crop domestication (including the crucial switch-over from brittle rachis to tough) was not completed until closer to 7000 BC – that is roughly ten times as long as it need have taken – if, that is, humans really had stumbled blindly into the whole process, following the trajectory dictated by changes in their crops.36 To be clear: that’s 3,000 years of human history, far too long to constitute an ‘Agricultural Revolution’ or even to be considered some kind of transitional
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