in certain parts of the region such as northern Syria, 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
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