The domestication of certain cereals in the Fertile Crescent can be seen, through the deliberate selection of the best and most suitable strains, as the first (inadvertent) modification of another living being’s genome by humans to achieve their own goals (to eat it, in this case). In the case of wheat and barley, it is the (usually recessive) mutation of a single gene (!) that causes the pods to fail to open spontaneously, allowing the seeds to fall to the ground where they could germinate. This artificial selection of the species by humans led to wheat, where the seeds are kept in the pods and can therefore be easily harvested to make flour and bread. This genetic mutation would have been lethal to the plant in a natural environment without human intervention, as it would have been unable to reproduce, and therefore natural selection made it recessive (meaning that those strains that did not have it as a recessive mutation became extinct).
