Homo Sapiens: How gluten has been a part of our lives for years

Homo Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harai

In the race of cooks section, it discusses how in the quest for world domination was the discovery of fire 800,000 years ago. It allowed them to cook and digest things things were unable to previously in their natural form such as wheat, rice and potatoes as it killed parasites as well as it making it easier for humans to consume. This cut down the average eating time of a human to a mere one hour a day compared to our ancestors, the chimpanzee who spends up to 5 hours a day chewing food. Scientists believe that this use of fire revolutionised humans as a species; leading to smaller teeth and shorter intestines.

'Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe's surface, almost ten times the size of Britain.'

'Wheat manipulated Homo sapiens to its advantage.'
By humans investing more time in cultivating wheat within a few millennia they were doing little other with their days other than taking care of their plants and this situation can be seen all over the world.

However wheat took a lot of maintenance and in return the humans who cultivated the crop spent their lives tending to it and some may suggest that in this way wheat controlled their lives 'wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so sapiens broke their backs clearing fields.' Their bodies were not adapted to the damaging nature of wheat and as a result caused problems such as arthritis slipped discs and hernias. Also as a result of these demanding tasks it resulted in the change of the sapiens lives as they knew it; once hunter gatherers soon became settlers as they lived by their crops to attend to them regularly and easily and therefore changed their way of life forever.

'We didn't domesticate wheat. Wheat domesticated us.'

This way of life did not offer these sapiens a better diet. A human functions with a large variety of different groups of foods and this one type of grain was not possible to sustain which lead to health problems such as a lack of minerals and vitamins.

Their livelihood was also affected. A lifestyle they were used to, being a hunter-gatherer, they were able to not rely on just one type of food and therefore could weather any droughts or natural disasters however these peasants who settled onto farms were forced to bulk store their stock and if there was a natural disaster it resulted in this stagnant population being wiped out in the millions as they were unable to adapt.