Let me tell you a little story about brassicas... broccoli, cabbage, bok choi, cauliflower, kohlrabi, canola oil. They're all this little guy.
Edit: Shit! I missed the exploding part.
Wait kohlrabi is related to broccoli. My mind is blow since I always think of it as a root vegetable(I know it’s not but still). Also I should add to my garden this year you don’t see it very often at store and my parents and grandparents loved it
Bananas are a similar one to corn too. Take something almost entirely inedible and cultivate it into something edible. Makes you wonder what convinced them to start.
Could be. We still don't know why people became sedentary farmers over hunter-gatherers, but it's happened many times in history.
Somehow, farming happened independently but around the same time around the world, between 8000 and 10000 years ago. This is everywhere from Europe to the Americas to New Guinea, all apparently independently of each other!
Saying we don't know is kinda dumb though, farming allows a population group to massively outperform a hunter gatherer group in terms of food and energy collected over a year, this allows them to have more children, and results in fewer deaths due to accidents while hunting. Farming also means fewer people are required for the same amount of food intake leaving more people free to do other things like develop tools and weapons
This all snowballs resulting in massive growth that allows the farming group to kill off or absorb any group that doesn't farm.
Same as natural selection/evolution, random choices/changes occur and the ones that lead to more children are the ones that last 1000s of years.
If I'm going off my own experience and behaviors, I would assume that laziness made it seem like simply planting things would take less effort than hunting down an animal without doing hard calculations on total calories in/out and without imagining what could go wrong with the "lazy" approach.
I don't think you understand how hard it is to plow a field without draught animals. They didn't have domestic horses or oxen when farming began. It was incredibly hard work vs. just cutting down wild plants and shooting animals with animals or hitting them with spears. And, of course, processing grains by hand before milling was invented was also very hard work. You can't just eat wheat as-is. You have to turn it into flour and cook with it.
The "lazy" people would be the ones who didn't want to do all of that and instead just walk around the woods until they saw a deer and then shoot it.
The biggest advantage of agriculture over hunter-gathering is storage during cold or dry seasons when foraged food could be harder to come by, but it is not clear that this was an advantage of farming or the reason for it.
I'm assuming it started small and simple (perhaps just intentionally dropping seeds in a location and hoping for the best) and then problem-solving for higher yields is what led to the great amount of work in the end. It's like how making a weapon can range from simply picking up a stick to refining and material science to mass production methods (to outfit an entire army), all the way up to splitting the atom. There's a wide gulf between wanting to have some extra food growing in a convenient location and wanting to feed an entire village throughout the entire year solely on cultivated food.
Probably used is processed in a dish or alcohol were the seeds didn't matter much, and over time farmers just made it easier to eat raw because "why not?"