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Not sure if this is addressed in the movie and I missed it, or if it's just a seemingly significant plot-point that's brought up and then ignored, but what was the origin of the "human vegetation" encountered on the alien planet?

I assume that

It could not have arrived with Ellie, since she reached the planet on an Engineer ship and wasn't really afforded the opportunity to load it up with Earth provisions before setting off (nor is there any guarantee or even plausible likelihood that "provisions" stocked on an exploration vessel's lifeboat would include seeds for sowing crops). And also that even if she had, David probably subdued her long before she got to the point of needing to cultivate food to survive (and since his first move upon arrival was apparently to kill all animal life on the planet, it's not like there'd be any insects around to pollinate the stuff anyways).

Was the wheat introduced to the planet, and if so, by whom?

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    Since we learn later in the movie that Engineers used to live on that planet, I assume the implication is that the Engineers brought wheat to Earth in addition to creating humans (...and somehow Earth wheat hasn't noticeably diverged from Engineer wheat at all since then).
    – Ixrec
    May 22 '17 at 14:36
  • I was thinking that might be the case. But is there anything in the film to support that implication? It also seems that there's some degree of variation in terms of what happens after the Engineers 'seed' a planet (which I assume is why they decide they sometimes need to cleanse their 'failed' experiments), which tends to support opposite position.
    – aroth
    May 22 '17 at 14:43
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    From what I had gathered, it could have been brought back to that planet from earth. As we saw in the previous movie, the Engineer's had visited earth previously and may have brought back some proof of our advancement in farming or something to that extent.
    – Austin
    May 22 '17 at 22:25
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We don't know for sure.

It is not definitely explained anywhere where the wheat came from. However, we can deduce some facts.

  • Someone grew the wheat (it was planted, as the characters point out)

  • The planet had a thriving civilization at some point

  • David was in the planet alone for a decade

So, we can draw 2 lines of thought from here.

The wheat was planted and grown by the Engineers. They had wheat, just like we did, and cultivated it. After a decade, we still find remnants of wheat fields from their civilization.

The wheat was planted by David. David was alone for a decade and didn't have much to do. He may have planted it for his biological experiments. Where he found the wheat to grow it in the first place, I'm not sure. Again, maybe it was already there, or maybe he built it somehow?

I lean towards the first hypothesis, but we can only speculate, and unless the director or writers mention the topic, we do not know for sure.

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