hopeposting

This is true, but also, a sentiment that's coming to mind is a mashup of "the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." And "a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit".

Most of the benefits of domestication would be seen super far down the line, and if we're talking about humans near the beginning of agriculture, which is (as I understand it), one of the developments that really shaped how humans developed, in terms of how we build communities, knowledge and culture. As a biochemist, I can't really fathom how the practical understanding of selective breeding could even arise in these circumstances. Maybe superstitions that solidify into rituals, which become practical knowledge? Either way, it would surely take multiple human generations for it to even start working, as a crop improvement method.

Linking that back into the two aphorisms I mentioned, the big chunk of time mentioned in them is 1, maybe 2 generations of time. That amount of time feels real to me in a way that 1000 years can't, because I met my great-grandma, and she was a real person, who knew other real people. Crop domestication is so impressive because there's so much gap between the action and the payoff. It also makes me very impressed with humans, because I used to be the kind of asshole that /r/iamverysmart takes the piss of, and I used to fall into the trap of thinking that pre-Enlightenment humans were unintelligent. (I have fortunately learned to value the humanities in the time since then)