Long before the first human planted a seed, several insects had already figured out agriculture, and they didn't even copy each other. Somewhere between 40 and 66 million years ago, ants, termites, and beetles each independently stumbled onto the same idea: instead of just gathering food, grow it.

The most famous farmers are the attine ants, ancestors of today's leafcutters. They don't eat the leaves they harvest. Instead, they carry them underground, chew them into mulch, and use it as a growing bed for a specific fungus. The fungus does the hard work of breaking down the plant matter, and the ants eat the fungus in return.

Termites had the same idea on a grander scale. Africa's Macrotermes species build towering mud mounds engineered with airflow channels to control temperature and humidity for the fungus gardens hidden inside, some mounds housing a queen that lays 20,000 eggs a day.

Meanwhile, deep in the woods, ambrosia beetles bore tunnels into trees and cultivate their own fungus gardens along the tunnel walls, feeding entirely on what they grow.

And it's not just fungus. One ant species in Fiji, Philidris nagasau, farms actual plants: it fertilizes, defends, and lives inside a group of epiphytes it depends on entirely.

All of this happened tens of millions of years before a single human ever cultivated wheat. Farming wasn't our idea. We were just the latest species to discover it.