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Look at the seed. It is oblong, tapered like a bowling pin, ashy black, smaller than a peppercorn.”You can see it’s not really domesticated,” Chris Schmidt says.

Schmidt, who is prematurely bald, soft-spoken, a bit monastic, a noticer of small things, looks exactly like an entomologist from the moment you meet him long before he actually tells you that’s his specialty. He curates a community seed bank in Tucson Arizona. Right now, he is abrading a seed’s tough skin with his gardener’s battered thumbnail before placing it on a moist paper towel to sprout. “Most modern food crops are bred for thinner seed coats,” he explains. “It speeds up germination. But if you breed the coat too thin, you’re susceptible to disease.”

The seed in question is a pip of Proboscidea sp., devil’s claw, an annual of the desert Southwest whose extravagantly hooked fruit was once dispersed on the woolly fetlocks of bison. (Ranch cattle now do the honors.) It was indifferently cultivated by Arizona’s Tohono O’odham people for centuries as a source of food and basketry pigment. They never quite slimmed down that coat.

Humankind’s tinkering with seed coats “testae” to botanists is just one small step in a saga of plant husbandry that began perhaps 11,000 years ago, when a hungry genius in what is now Syria first tried cultivating wild rye grass. His experiment unwittingly launched an agricultural revolution that arrested our species’ nomadic impulses, built towns and empires, and ultimately spawned monotheism, organized warfare, and the Food Network-not to mention specialized jobs such as “seed bank curator” and “journalist.”