system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Do we know anything of prehistoric fruits and vegetables?

Are there any fossils of plants that were once edible or could be edible by humans today?
gpt
The paleolithic is recent enough that not much is fossilized, but also recent enough that genes haven't drifted much, except by artificial selection.

This means that there exists at least one wild plant that is closely related to a recent ancestor of almost any example of a fruit, vegetable, or grain you might imagine.

Apples and pears? Try a haw.

Carrots and parsnips? See Queen Anne's Lace roots.

Swiss chard and beets? Have a small amount of pigweed (it's too high in oxalate for me to recommend eating very much of it).

Artichoke? Look at a thistle...but maybe only cook its thick, fleshy stem, because the flowers are *super* tiny during the stage of development where one would eat an artichoke.

Wikipedia has taxonomic info in the sidebar of each fruit or vegetable article, and can help you find this sort of relationship for whatever else strikes your fancy. Be warned, some things (potatoes and beans, for example) are toxic in the wild type.