> We are probably unable to recreate crops from wild genetics at this point. Every variety we lose is gone forever. Domesticated food animals are facing the same fate. I don't think we could recreate the domesticated sheep from the wild at this point.

Unless the wild forebear is extinct it is exceedingly unlikely we’d be unable to recreate crops from wild genetics. It wouldn’t be worthwhile; even pre selective breeding domesticates are very different from wild stock and we’d be better off starting from literally any domesticate than wild stock for almost all crops but we could. Selective breeding is very well understood technology. For most purposes if you wanted to recreate a particular strain that existed in the past you’d cross multiple wild types with multiple domesticates so you start off with all the traits you want in say 32 plants, the second generation 16, and so on until they’re all in 1 plant. This both overstates and understates the difficultly; overstates because you’re not going to start with 32 traits, understates because traits aren’t on/off, they’re on a continuum.

But fundamentally this is a problem of money and time, an engineering one, not a basic science one. If you look at the Wikipedia page for aurochs there are currently seven projects attempting to back breed them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs

Or look at the effort to bring back the American Chestnut. It’ll happen within my lifetime.

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