Excellent presentation. Harlan’s powerful paper [Harlan JR. 1967 A wild wheat harvest in Turkey. Archaeology 20, 197–201] was a key reference in our recent attempt to provide a generic explanation for the origins of cereal agriculture [DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2018.0277]. Our paper reviewed the ecology of the immediate wild relatives of einkorn, emmer and barley and found – as Harlan had demonstrated – that they grow in `massive’ monodominant stands (as do the relatives of oats, rye and Asian rice).
We suggested that this ancestral monodominance validated present-day cereal monocultures.
A common adaptive feature of these Asian cereal relatives is their long awns – clearly seen in the photo. These awns have tiny ratchet teeth capable of burying the unusually large seeds in the ground: perhaps an explanation as to why modern cereal farming needs so much tilling and deep seeding to replace the previous shattering and seed burying found in nature.