Weed killing has been integral to farming since it's inception.^1 Chemical herbicides were popularized in the 19th century, which necessarily coincided with the modern population explosion.
^1 https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=1759....
“The earliest known weed control technology in 8000 BCE was the plow and hand-weeding (which includes hand-pulling, cutting with a knife, hoes and mattocks).”
That's a very long gap till 8,000 BC.
https://imgur.com/a/Bly85h8 - these are 2 weeds that have taken over and killed a simple flowering plant from our yard. You can see there are 2 plots that we have spliced from our healthy flowers, where we have been testing weed control methodology, since the neighbors have let these weeds become their lawn. The simple solution seems to be wait until the weed is big enough to have a solid rootball and pull it up manually. This is both the common way for small gardens to be managed AND the only solution for certain invasive species like the Himalayan blackberry which can regrow from stalks or leaves after being mulched and buried - they are resilient to pretty much every pesticide, but they aren't our problem after moving out of WA.
In farmland, you can go over every inch of your acreage and try to spot treat (which won't stop proliferation) or you can uniformly treat, as modern farming currently does.
Remember we started with wild plants so a significant energy investments beyond throwing seeds may simply have been wasted effort because it’s less needed and has lower rewards. Further removing competitors is a non obvious behavor.
The benefits of a possible harvest increased after destination so the time lag between just tossing seeds and active farming could have been a very long period.
It's what people do without any training. It's not necessary to have archaeological support for instinctive behavior. There's no archaeological support people swatted at flies during that time period. Again, this is rather pointless when you're arguing that early man was less capable than a child. GL with whatever.
Tossing seeds around can however be accidental, you can easily do it without intention.
It's not clear what you mean by "learned" here. You have plants. Other plants grow next to them and they die. It's observed learning (as I showed in the photos), similar to learning fire is hot. You have been implying it's more than that and are flat wrong on this simple understanding of reality. There's nobody that can help you with that.
Second you described learning and ignored culture showing children this relationship. Looking at a prepared area doesn't exist without someone preparing the area.
Clearly you don't understand what’s going on.
> Second you described learning and ignored culture showing children this relationship.
You're ascribing some definition of "culture" when the behavior is intuitive. I can understand if you're making an assumption about how stupid ancient man was, but that is simply a bias within your own imagination.
> In effect they where growing weeds.
Weeds are competing plant life, compared to the cultivation of specific species. The dictionary doesn't do anyone a lot of favors here, but that's the common parlance.
We were talking about Farming, then cultivation, which are strictly different things. Now you've moved to "domestication" all the while leaning on some strange alternate definition, or you're trolling. I don't think I can help you any more.
Farming existed before pesticide.
Humanity has gotten very good at it and weedkilling is a big part of it. But, wild plants propagate quite well on their own, spending seeds of things you want more of results in more of that species. Preparing the environment and selecting seeds ca push that much further but the absolute minimum threshold is very low. Toss eaten apples into your yard, and eventually you get apple trees.
> people tossing specific seeds on the ground 20,000 years ago
This seems irrelevant to whether farming occurred before people.
I don't think the line is very clear cut at all, but it does involve intentional intervention by a species not the plant.
> This seems irrelevant to whether farming occurred before people.
It gets to if for example squirrels storing seeds underground is possibly farming or not. It's an intentional activity, but takes too long for a specific squirrel to see much benefit from it. IMO, it’s kind of a mind bender when you really dig into it.
I think a reassemble argument is squirrels as a species farm though individuals don’t.
https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/32461-fungusfarming-ants...
As to ants, do you think they evolved that trait before or after they started farming.
Additionally, billions face food uncertainty. Not because the food is not enough.