Where did the wheat actually come from?
Not sure if this is addressed in the movie and I missed it, or if it's just a seemingly significant plot-point that's brought up and then ignored, but what was the origin of the "human vegetation" encountered on the alien planet?
I assume that
It could not have arrived with Ellie, since she reached the planet on an Engineer ship and wasn't really afforded the opportunity to load it up with Earth provisions before setting off (nor is there any guarantee or even plausible likelihood that "provisions" stocked on an exploration vessel's lifeboat would include seeds for sowing crops). And also that even if she had, David probably subdued her long before she got to the point of needing to cultivate food to survive (and since his first move upon arrival was apparently to kill all animal life on the planet, it's not like there'd be any insects around to pollinate the stuff anyways).
Was the wheat introduced to the planet, and if so, by whom?
Best Answer
We don't know for sure.
It is not definitely explained anywhere where the wheat came from. However, we can deduce some facts.
Someone grew the wheat (it was planted, as the characters point out)
The planet had a thriving civilization at some point
David was in the planet alone for a decade
So, we can draw 2 lines of thought from here.
The wheat was planted and grown by the Engineers. They had wheat, just like we did, and cultivated it. After a decade, we still find remnants of wheat fields from their civilization.
The wheat was planted by David. David was alone for a decade and didn't have much to do. He may have planted it for his biological experiments. Where he found the wheat to grow it in the first place, I'm not sure. Again, maybe it was already there, or maybe he built it somehow?
I lean towards the first hypothesis, but we can only speculate, and unless the director or writers mention the topic, we do not know for sure.
Pictures about "Where did the wheat actually come from?"
Did wheat come from the Old World?
Posted October 13, 2014. Until explorer Christopher Columbus landed in the West Indies, wheat was not known in the Americas, despite having first been planted around 8,000 BC. Columbus was not the only explorer to introduce wheat in the New World.When was wheat first discovered?
The archaeological record suggests that wheat was first cultivated in the regions of the Fertile Crescent around 9600 BCE. Botanically, the wheat kernel is a type of fruit called a caryopsis.What is the ancestor of wheat?
Wheat's D genome ancestor is the goatgrass Aegilops tauschii, which occurs across a broad range of the Middle East and Asia from Syria to China. DNA analysis of wheat and its wild relatives led Marcussen et al.The History of Wheat and Bread | Loulis Museum
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