Top ten greatest invention of mankind.

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Well, I was being silly.

You mean horribly inefficient. Take wheat for example. Wild wheat seeds dropped from the plant when ripe making it difficult to harvest. It wasn't until artificial selection (or maybe accidental selection) of variants that kept the seed on the stalk making harvesting much easier, and would grow in differing soils/conditions that it become a viable large scale crop. It was domesticated. But then, how do you effectively cultivate and harvest all that wheat to feed all those people? With machines. And what powers those machines? That's right, domesticated animals.

Modern farming would use internal combustion engines to get the required level of efficiency, not animals.

I'm not an expert on ancient farming, but I understand that a fairly large part of it was simply done by humans, rather than machines. That might be horribly inefficient from a modern motorized tractor perspective, but it's a heck of a lot better than the gatherer part of hunter/gatherer, which is what it was preceded by.