A few years ago, I attended a ‘living history’ museum. My memory is very hazy, but there was a field of a grain…(barley? rye? buckwheat? oats?) that was eluded to as a coincidentally cultivated grain. Again, I’m not sure I remember correctly; but the gist was, this grain was not the ‘target’ of cultivation, only that it grew and resembled the targeted grain, that is was also grown in the fields with that targeted grain. Only later was it understood to be a separate grain, and selected out to be grown and cultivated separately.
Does anyone have any idea if this is remotely true, and if so, what those two grains might be?
Emmer wheat, a wild wheat which contributed to the genetics of modern wheat probably long after it was originally cultivated?
In ancient grain fields, many species of grass commingled, it was nothing like the monocrop wheat of today. There were many genetically intertwined species and subspecies of wheat-like grasses grown in the same fields.
Buckwheat is not a grass, it’s related to sorrel and rhubarb.
I believe the mechanism you are referring to is called Vavilovian mimicry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry
Human cultivation creates a selection pressure on weeds to become more similar to the crop, so that they are less likely to be, well, weeded out, and more likely to be spread together with the original crop. This leads to selection of weeds with larger seeds that remain attached to the stalk, and can ultimately make the weed a desirable crop as well. Both rye and oats are believed to have developed in this fashion.
That was alluded to. An allusion is an oblique or cryptic reference to something similar or related. The prosecutor alluded to the suspect’s long rap sheet as part of why he should be found guilty.
Eluded means to escape from. The speedy bunny eluded the hungry bobcat.
@burpo_the_wonder_mutt: As to quadrotriticale, it was a typical Star Trek allusion to pure technobabble since plausible future science so often eluded the writers.
Barley and oats look nothing like wheat (or each other), at least as far as the cultivated varieties you see in the fields go, so to my uneducated eye it would be surprising if they had ever been mistaken for one another.
I see a lot of sorghum bicolor growing in corn (maize) fields. When you have a poor variety of it growing in a field where you don’t want it, farmers call it shattercane. When you deliberately grow a variety that produces lots of seeds, farmers call the plant milo, and call the seed millet. If you grow a variety that produces more sap for pressing and making syrup/molasses, they call it sorghum.
Over time, Vavilovian mimicry may cause sorghum bicolor to become more maize-like because successful reproduction of the weed variety may depend on being unnoticed in the corn field, being incidentally harvested by a combine set up for maize (equipped with a corn header), and subsequently planted by a corn planter?
I now see that there are some types of wheat which look like barley and rye, so my contribution here may not actually be very useful. Oats remain completely different in appearance, as far as I can tell.