From Chief to Ball

Chen Jian and his clan looked at the piled up ears of wheat, bean pods and other things. Most of them were picked before they were fully mature, and now they were dried out and shriveled.

From then on, the clansmen had one more task, which was to get the seeds out of these wheat ears and pods.In the past, it was peeled by hand, but this time Chen Jian made a flail.

Make a flat piece of land, and after stepping on it, pile the bean pods and the like on it to drive away the dodo birds and geese who are staring at each other.

I found two sticks, one long and one short, connected together with a rope, like nunchakus.Swinging the long pole, the short stick will be smashed down, smashing the dry bean pods or ears of wheat.

Of course, this kind of work should be done by men, and women use small brooms made of branches and grass to carefully sweep up the beans and wheat grains bit by bit. Even if only a few dozen fall outside, they will be carefully piled up. .

Yuqian'er was about to be driven crazy by this work. The broom could never sweep it so clean, and the green and white beans were so conspicuous on the ground. Hastily swept into a pile...

Chen Jian looked at Yuqianer running around there with a smile, and said to himself that obsessive-compulsive disorder is really not suitable for watching threshing wheat. If the land is planted in the future, will it be possible to pick up all the leftovers in the field?

The people of the tribe watched the pods that used to be peeled open one by one, and their own mouths were like the pods.

Chen Jian said that there is no need to line up today, he will cook a dinner for the tribe, which can be regarded as a celebration of the new life that will be born in the tribe next time Xingzihuang.

People laughed more happily, it doesn't matter if they line up or not, they are used to it anyway.On the contrary, the things made by Chen Jian are delicious. In the past, there were no clay pots and bowls, and these things were smashed and eaten raw. I don't know how they will taste this time.

Chen Jian wants to let these people see hope and see what kind of life the land they have watered with their sweat will bring them, so that they can be tired and joyful at the same time.

Since it was going to be a celebration, a ram was pulled out from the sheepfold and killed. This was the first time the clansman killed a sheep from the sheepfold.

Everyone was busy, the fire was lit, and on the earthen pot stand, the woman distributed some peas, wheat grains, or other seeds, and lightly smashed the bran with a stone to reveal a little whiteness inside.

The skin of wheat is very thick, and it is difficult to eat and digest, but now there is no stone mill or mill, so there is no way to make flour.

"It's time to get a stone mill when I have time, at least I can eat dumplings in winter..."

This is his favorite food, and it is also his favorite custom. In the era when there were no stone mills, even if these plants were domesticated, they would have to eat wheat grains and other foods for a long time.

Eating oatmeal tonight is inevitable, but since it's a celebration, it needs to be a little different.

Throw the diced mutton and green onions into a clay pot, put all kinds of condiments you can find and cook it into a white soup, put grains such as wheat grains, peas, and sorghum, and spread a layer of tubers on top.

Several large clay pots made a gurgling sound together, and the seductive aroma came out from inside. The clansmen couldn't help but twitch their noses. Someone brought the pots to fetch water early on, and everything was ready.

The staple food is rice, and there are always vegetables. A few big fish are brought in, and several women cut them up together, and make them into slices with sharp stone knives. They don't need to be cooked, they can be eaten raw like this.

The mustard greens grown in the vegetable bed are not yet ripe, and yellow mustard is not available, but there are substitutes.

"Book of Rites" once said: "Scallions are used in spring, and mustards are used in summer."The ancients also took precautions against the problem of parasites. "If you don't like the sauce, don't eat it." Garlic and onion can contain the parasites in it.

Pour a spoonful of sour apricot vinegar with crushed green onion and garlic, add a little salt and a little maple syrup, and the sauce is adjusted, less spicy and more sweet and sour.

The celebratory dinner started so simply. The children chewed the scorched rice crust on the bottom of the clay pot, showing their good teeth; As for the porridge, I smacked the taste inside with my good teeth and was full of praise.

"Jian, do you think we will be able to eat this kind of food every day in the land we opened?"

The clansmen felt that it would be possible, but they still hoped that Chen Jian would say it himself, so that they could feel more at ease.

"Yeah, when the apricots turn yellow again, we can eat this kind of meal every day."

After hearing the affirmative answer, the clansmen all laughed, touched the calluses on their hands, and felt that the exhaustion these days was worth it.Isn't living just to eat better?

Someone pointed to the unbroken wheat ears and pods and said, "We can eat it now. These are enough for us to eat for several days. I want to eat every day."

Chen Jian shook his head and said, "I can't eat these, I want to use them."

"what is it used for?"

He took out a thin ear of wheat with only ten grains and said, "I want to make more seeds on it. Now there are ten grains. One day there may be twenty grains in one ear."

Chapter 11 Breeding Feasibility Report

The current concept of the clansmen is simple and crude: the bigger and the more, the better.

If a stalk of wheat can really contain twenty grains of wheat, then the same basket of wheat ears can produce a lot of food that can be steamed. The reason is very simple.

Since Chen Jian said yes, the clansmen certainly believed it.

However, some people have different ideas.

Even though the stories and myths told by Chen Jian have been subtly instilling the truth that talent is the spirit of all things, some people still feel that there is something that they don't know that is controlling everything.

It's like people have two legs, pigs have four legs, bloom when it's hot, and wither when it's cold...all of these things are taken for granted, and this is something that has been preordained by God.

But now Chen Jian said that one day the original ten grains of wheat would become twenty. These people felt a little scary. They didn't understand what they were afraid of and couldn't express it in words.

Perhaps in a more fanciful way, and in a way that the people of the tribe cannot sum up, it means that mortals have set foot in the realm of the gods and disrupted the order established by the gods.

Although Chen Jian spoke proudly, he also knew that breeding was an extremely long process, and he didn't know how long it would take to succeed.

For example, wheat, the original wheat is just an ordinary diploid plant, like human beings, the chromosomes are paired.

In simple and inappropriate terms, it is like single eyelid and double eyelid, A and a are paired, and meiosis occurs when a baby is born, sperm cells and egg cells separate the pair of Aa, and then combine with cells of the opposite sex.

而陈健前世吃的小麦，实际上是六倍体，通俗地讲它体内的基因对是A1、A2、A3配上a1、a2、a3。

The original Aa wheat has fewer seeds, is ridiculously long, has poor tillering ability, and has a low seed setting rate.

One day there may be a spring frost, because the cold induced its chromosomes to double, and it became A1, A2 with a1, a2, which is tetraploid wheat.

The tetraploid wheat has become sturdier and produced more seeds.

By chance, it may have crossed with distant relatives such as wild knotweed and rye. These distant relatives are all diploid, but it is tetraploid, so the base pairing is not perfect, forming triploid seeds .

There must be an even number of gene pairs to produce offspring, because the odd number of pairs cannot be a perfect fit after differentiation into sperm and egg cells.

This triploid plant can germinate, grow, flower, and produce ears, but it is sterile, with no seeds in the ears.Kind of like a mule from a horse and a donkey, but a little different.

Originally, it was impossible for this infertile seed to have offspring, but the miracle of nature appeared again, acting as a maternity hospital.

These originally sterile seeds may have experienced another spring frost, or were roasted by fire or smoked by some poisonous gas. In short, its chromosomes doubled again, from triploid to hexaploid.

Nature cured its infertility, and also gifted it with more heterologous genes, allowing it to grow stronger and bear more fruit.

Because wheat is a monoecious plant, most of the time it is self-pollinating. This natural hybridization does not know how many generations the ancients have bred; and the chromosome doubling caused by spring frost and autumn cold is even more accidental.

During the planting process, people discovered that some wheat had larger spikes and stronger tillering ability. They did not know that these wheat had been inadvertently modified by nature.

However, people used experience to preserve these wheat as seeds, and propagated it from generation to generation, and eventually covered the whole world.

This may be a process of tens of thousands of years. Chen Jian cannot control the randomness inside, but he can use external force to speed up the process of chromosome doubling.

As for whether the produced tetraploid or hexaploid is high-yielding, it requires a long artificial selection.

This is not too difficult. The same principle can be used on plants such as strawberries to force them to grow bigger, and even tetraploid watermelons and diploid watermelons can be crossed to produce seedless watermelons.