The apple's "ancient ancestor" has been <i>dead</i> for thousands of years, this is at best a similar cousin. :p<p>Yeah, I don't know what they meant, but once you see that mistake in evolutionary discussions, it's hard to unsee it.<p>Sometimes I like to explicitly describe planting things as mankind's oldest technology. Know-how like which berries will kill you and which won't are an important knowledge base, and people today are likely to underestimate how much work--unsung, anonymous--was put into building it, and how much may have been forgotten.