Agriculture and such

When I think about agriculture and how it was first formed, the first question that comes to my mind is, "how did they know which plants were okay to eat and which were not?" Now, Im talking about when it first started out. I wonder if they ever tried to eat some kind of random plant and ended up dying or getting really sick from it. It must have been really hard to start farming and domesticating animals in a brand new place. At the end of the ice age, there must've been tons of new plants that were covered by the ice. There must have been a lot of trial and error with choosing plants but they prevailed and got humans to where we are today. I am also intrigued to find out that the best place for agriculture back then was in Southwest Asia. I am shocked to hear that because nowadays, Southwest Asia is made up of countries like Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. This whole area is basically all desert with not much wetlands. But the book also states that around 10,000 to 5,000 years ago, there was no Sahara desert which leads us to believe that maybe the whole geographic region of the Middle East was flipped back then. Reading about the Catalhuyuk village was very interesting. I found it interesting to read about a village with no real leadership. All the people in that village lived with equality among each other and among their genders. Men had their role of hunting and women had their role of farming. Men had no dominance over females. However, this village did not survive which means that maybe the lack of leadership was the cause of their downfall. As history progresses, more towns and villages start to form including the Greek and Roman empires. Both of these nations basically controlled everything back then which makes me believe that the reason they did so well was because of their leadership and Chiefdoms.