IT SOUNDS simple, obvious even. But it was the first step towards cultivating crops, which spawned the dawn of agriculture.
Stone Age humans in the Fertile Crescent appear to have harvested wild wheat and barley by scooping fallen grains from the ground with their fingers. This foraging would often have provided ample surpluses – perhaps even enough to encourage early humans to experiment with sowing seeds.
Until now, most anthropologists believed fallen grains would have been eaten by ants or rodents, and that what was left over would soon have been buried in the soil. But when Ehud Weiss of Harvard…
