• Burninator05@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Was ancient wheat the same as wheat today or was it selectively pollinated to get what we have now?

      • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        There’s degrees of difference. Wheat goes through a new generation every year. Faster if you have a greenhouse. People go through a new generation every few decades. Wheat can thus change 20-30 times faster than people.

        A century is, at minimum, 100 different “iterations” of the wheat genome. A century is ~3 “iterations” of humans.

        • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          Human selection of wheat would probably converge, as in humans would keep selecting the best wheat until it reaches some kind of optimal, steady state, then it would change slower as the selection process would be more about preserving the state.

      • Auli
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        2 months ago

        How have humans changed.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      It’s been selected for some 5k years, give or take. One study found out that, starting from wild wheat, it’d take roughly 30 years to fully domesticate the crop. Bananas, maize, soy, almond and others that we eat are also very different from their wild variants