Here's what 9,000 years of breeding has done to corn, peaches, and other crops

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Fruits and vegetables have changed a lot since the onset of agriculture 10,000 years ago, as generation after generation of farmers artificially bred crops to select for more desirable traits like size and taste.
But that change can be hard to visualize. So James Kennedy, a chemistry teacher in Australia, created some terrific infographics to show just how drastic the evolution has been. This one, for instance, shows how corn has changed in the last 9,000 years — from a wild grass in the early Americas known as teosinte to the plump ears of corn we know today:
[h=3]The evolution of corn[/h]

(James Kennedy)

Here's what 9,000 years of breeding has done to corn, peaches, and other crops - Vox

 

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[h=3]The evolution of watermelon[/h]

(James Kennedy)
Here's another great graphic from Kennedy. Modern-day watermelons don't look anything like their distant ancestors from Southern Africa. That, too, is the result of thousands of years of breeding. Yet a few of the biggest advances also came in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, when crop scientists helped breed varieties that were resistant to disease and had a thicker rind — allowing watermelons to be grown all over the country.
Even to this day, we're still producing new types of watermelon — like the black Densuke watermelon grown on a single island in Japan. And crop scientists have produced seedless watermelons by adding chemicals to double a watermelon's chromosomes and then breeding the result with a normal watermelon.*

Here's what 9,000 years of breeding has done to corn, peaches, and other crops - Vox