@mimi
Many good varieties have come from chance seedlings. It's just a roll of the genetic dice. If you start with good varieties it's like rolling loaded dice, but you can still get snake eyes.
Off the top of my head, Hudson's Golden Gem was discovered growing at the side of an Oregon highway. Someone probably threw a core out of a car window. Carter Blue, an unusual apple with bluish leaves and skin was discovered by chance in the 1840's in Alabama. I'm pretty sure Roxbury Russet (MA) and
Chenango Strawberry were seedlings also. The last two are from per-Revolutionary times. IIRC, Roxbury Russet is the oldest American variety, possibly from the 1600's. Chenago Strawberry is from Chenango NY and highly praised by Thomas Jefferson who ordered fourteen(?) trees for Monticello. It actually tastes like apple and strawberry .

Modern apples are bred for easy growing, pest resistance, good traveling and preferably all ripening at once. These are good commercial qualities, but not necessarily good in the wild or backyard. For the home (and the wild) ripening over a period is best. In the wild so that seeds get scattered far and wide and at home so you don't have a one week glut of apples. The old varieties typically ripen over a month and should be picked daily.

If you have a bad apple and use the seed of that bad apple, will the tree, which grows out of that seed, produce only bad apples or not? If the tree produces only bad apples, we should ask the researchers to produce bad apple seeds that will produce good apples if the grow up to a tree. I am sure Monsanto could do that. And I am sure they would make a huge profit with it.

Have a good night sleep. Don't eat bad apples before going to bed... /s

@MrWebster
I think it's hard for some people to fathom the way things might have worked a long time ago when they can't see past biases of current, modern day, societal limitations, especially in regards to the "weaker" sex.

When it's necessary to feed yourself and your people, it would be completely stupid to tell an able bodied person they can't do something just because of anatomy. I went looking for the name of a tribe in Iran that I had read about, but can't find it. They didn't care what you had between your legs, you did what was necessary for survival. And the men, with their superior upper body strength actually made and mended clothes when necessary, among a plethora of other things. Again, they did what was necessary, all of them, and they're Muslim.

Who's to say that a small, lean female didn't provide assistance by using her endurance to tire prey or keep tracking injured prey, or maybe even be an expert shot at blinding prey rather than piercing thick hide with her little weak arms? However, arms are only weak if they're never used. I recently watched a video of an off grid couple on their homestead and for several years, she watered their huge garden with buckets because the water pressure on their rainwater system was too weak. Her arms are impressive!

Tanning hide built arm and chest muscles. Carrying buckets of water, babies, recent kills, same thing.

I think we miss a lot of possibilities regarding past peoples when we restrict the possibilities with our own modern day societal limitations regarding gender roles. Plus, we're not talking about soft, salon pampered people. These were hardcore survivors. I'm betting there were a lot of jobs done by everyone, in the name of survival.

So there is the article about thed original research and the original research. The linked article tries to paint men and women as equal in hunting seems to want to impose a feminist reading of the research. But here are my questions.

The age of the female hunters of late teens and early twenties is also the age at which women are at their most fertile. So these tribal groups were going to put women in high risk activities rather than having them producing and caring for offspring while engaging in low risk activities such as gathering food stuffs? So like modern women having it all, females nursed their children in the morning and in the afternoon went out hunting large game animals?

Do human females have the upper body strength to pierce the skin and hides of "large game animals"? Offhand, I doubt it. They may have worked in groups with other men and women, in which case the females played support roles and did such activities as dressing the animal they killed.

There is what looks like a supposition that items buried with somebody represented their daily activities. This seems more speculative than established fact. It may be a good supposition, but it still seems a supposition.