I’m a lil stoned right now and Google’s no help, so yeah folks, I’m countin on you. I mean, how did our ancestors even know that coverin a apple seed in dirt and throwin water on it would make an apple tree? That shit crazy, right?
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The annunaki of course.
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Relax, I got this:
Johnny Appleseed. He is Legend.
Or Newton staring at trees/reading a book under a tree and getting knocked upside his head.
They had a LOT of free time. First, it happens on accident: you prefer certain fruits so you eat those and the seeds get the advantage of your fertilizer once you pass them and you find more of the foods you prefer the more this happens. Eventually, you start doing it on purpose and focusing on how to make the plants even better and the process faster.
The domestication of plants is really fascinating, Guns, Germs, & Steel has a really well written chapter about it if you’re ever bored some night.
For instance, strawberries were incredibly hard to domesticate. Humans prefer big sweet strawberries, but birds prefer small bitter strawberries. Try as we might to plant only the large strawberries, the birds always got there first and “planted” the seeds of the small bitter ones by passing them and ruining all our hard work. Romans had some success with giant nets they put all around the crops, but it really took the invention of the greenhouse to keep them out and get it right.
Edit: and Johnny Appleseed went around planting apples from seeds. Apples from seed aren’t sweet. But, settlers loved sour apples because they were perfect for making hard cider and apple jack (80 proof apple liquor.) Most elementary school teachers leave out the part about him being a bootlegging preacher.
Trial and error. Just like how devs make good fighters.
snaaake’s mom thought them 
There is no true answer to this question, considering it was before recorded history. It’s the same thing as asking how did humans know to cook food? Or why religion was invented and why so many cultures even have one and why 90% of those religions consist of super beings from the sky? Heck, to this day, no one knows why almost every culture has dragons of some sort.
Some questions will never be answered.
She doesn’t plant seeds. She swallows them, and on occasion uses them as makeshift moisturizer.
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really? You must be quite high if this question boggles you.
So when ancient man saw food growing from the ground, and threw out the inedible parts, which grew into more food in the ground, you think they weren’t able to put two and two together?
you forget, society has us believe that ancient man was a bumbling moron incapable of higher thought.
_
But its always aliens. God damn it ElderGod.
That’s highly improbable.
^ Yeh cos it’s not like we can learn anything through the observation of patterns
What SoV said.
If anything, we’ve gotten stupider since then.
We have more knowledge, and IQs are generally trending up, but I mean compared to a time when being stupid meant certain death.
There’s no way anyone would be able to just say “oh seed + time = tree.” The most likely answer is that large fruit trees probably isn’t where the discovery came from. Chances are the discovery came from something smaller like a beansprout, or something like that. Something small that when uprooted still resembled a seed of sorts. Eventually someone figured out that putting seeds in the ground would grow into larger plants, and since many seeds tend to look alike people started planting seeds for more crops. After that someone probably figured out that a small tree sapling kinda looks like the other plants, and they planted apple/peach, or whatever type of seeds and after some years they noticed those seeds were turning into saplings while the previously observed saplings were starting to look like trees.
A series of hypothetical events
Hunters went out caught animals gathered seeds.
One dude gets attacked by a lion, drops seeds the others run away. *
After the winter they return, the come pass the spot where their brother was eaten by a lion and find crops growing.
- Alternatively, they return home drop a few seeds along the way, come spring they notice them growing.
Read Snow Crash. All I’ma say. :tup:
Some say that the start of agriculture was the beginning of the downfall of man.
Sedentary agricultural societies begat the state, which was the beginning of slavery, money, greed, corruption… so in a roundabout way, yeah, that sounds about right.
trial and error. one of our ancestors accidentally dropping raw meat in fire, apparently. Modern human brains could not have developed on a raw vegan diet, unless we wanted to spend 1/3rd of the day gathering and eating plants/vegetables to obtain the same amount of calories attainable from eating small amounts of cooked meat.
Except the carrying of seeds implies that they knew what they were in the first place.