"Ten thousand years ago, wheat was just another form of wild grass, of no special significance; but within the space of a few millennia it was growing over large parts of the planet. How did it happen? The answer, according to Harari, is that wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. ‘This ape’, he writes, ‘had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat.’ If wheat didn’t like stones, humans had to clear them from their fields; if wheat didn’t want to share its space with other plants, people were obliged to labour under the hot sun weeding them out; if wheat craved water, people had to lug it from one place to another, and so on."
"The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by David Graeber.