PBS / Brilliant, which is unfortunately a Climate site half the time, sometimes comes up with a gem. Here, they bring to attention the cuckoo-effect... for plants. With bonus antiLysenkoism.
We Neolithics like our wheat (and barley... and millet). Apparently, other C4 grasses were able to mimic what wheat looks like. So these "tares" got into the harvests and sometimes got their seeds mixed with the corn. Vavilov found that rye, for one, was a weed in several societies. Oats for another.
I mean, sure; not everyone likes rye, Return to Zork aside. It happens however that rye and oats although annoying when competing with the "real" crops be edible, if pungent; and may survive environments those other cereals can't. If nothing else the livestock'll eat it (and oh boy are oats ever associated with them).
Barnyard grass, reported in 2019, started around the AD 1000s with the Song Dynasty, a short of Chinese exile-state in the ricepaddy southeast. This weed is the problem.
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