なぜドングリのような栄養に富むものの栽培作物化に人類はこれまで失敗し続けてきたか。

　要約するのがめんどくさいのでそのまま引用する。Jared DiamondのGuns, germs and steelはこのような面白い発見に満ち満ちている。
"It turns out that oak trees have three strikes against them. First, their slow growth would exhaust the patience of most farmers. Sown wheat yields a crop within a few months; a planted almond grows into a nutbearing tree in three or four years; but a planted acorn may not become productive for a decade or more.
Second, oak trees evolved to make nuts of a size and taste suitable for squirrels, which we've all seen burying, digging up, and eating acorns. Oaks grow from the occasional acorn that a squirrel forgets to dig up. With billions of squirrels each spreading hundreds of acorns every year to virtually any spot suitable for oak trees to grow, we humans didn't stand a chance of selecting oaks for the acorns that we wanted. Those same problems of slow growth and fast squirrels probably also explain why beech and hickory trees, heavily exploited as wild trees for their nuts by Europeans and Native Americans, respectively, were also not domesticated.
Finally, perhaps the most important difference between almonds and acorns is that bitterness is controlled by a single dominant gene in almonds but appears to be controlled by many genes in oaks. If ancient farmers planted almonds or acorns from the occasional nonbitter mutant tree, the laws of genetics dictate that half of the nuts from the resulting tree growing up would also be nonbitter in the case of almonds, but almost all would still be bitter in the case of oaks. That alone would kill the enthusiasm of any would-be acorn farmer who had defeated the squirrels and remained patient."