Farming origins gain 10,000 years

[Q.]

Sent to me by a friend... so, Dr John, what are the implications for our dietary needs?

Farming origins gain 10,000 years

Humans made their first tentative steps towards farming 23,000 years
ago, much earlier than previously thought.

Stone Age people in Israel collected the seeds of wild grasses some
10,000 years earlier than previously recognised, experts say.

These grasses included wild emmer wheat and barley, which were
forerunners of the varieties grown today.

A US-Israeli team report their findings in the latest Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.

The evidence comes from a collection of 90,000 prehistoric plant remains
dug up at Ohalo in the north of the country.

The Ohalo site was submerged in prehistoric times and left undisturbed
until recent excavations by Ehud Weiss of Harvard University and his
colleagues.

This low-oxygen environment beautifully preserved the charred plant
remains deposited there in Stone Age times.

Archaeologists have also found huts, camp fires, a human grave and stone
tools at the site.

Broad diet

Most of the evidence points to the Near East as the cradle of farming.
Indeed, the principal plant foods eaten by the people at Ohalo appear to
have been grasses, including the wild cereals emmer wheat and barley.

Grass remains also included a huge amount of small-grained wild grasses
at Ohalo such as brome, foxtail and alkali grass. However, these
small-grained wild grasses were to disappear from the human diet by
about 13,000 ago.

Anthropologists think farming may have started when hunter-gatherer
groups in South-West Asia were put under pressure by expanding human
populations and a reduction in hunting territories.

This forced them to rely less heavily on hunting large hoofed animals
like gazelle, fallow deer and wild cattle and broaden their diets to
include small mammals, birds, fish and small grass seeds; the latter
regarded as an essential first step towards agriculture.

These low-ranking foods are so-called because of the greater amount of
work involved in catching them than the return from the food itself.

Investigations at Ohalo also show that the human diet was much broader
during these Stone Age times than previously thought.

"We can say that such dietary breadth was never seen again in the
Levant," the researchers write in their Proceedings paper.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...re/3826731.stm

Published: 2004/06/23 12:51:49 GMT

© BBC MMIV

[Johnka]

That’s great, Ohalo made the BBC news! I know the archaeologist who directs the excavations here, and have visited the site a few times. In fact, I included this very site in my paleonutrition article: http://www.johnberardi.com/articles/...on/digging.htm


The occupants here were definitely much more intensified than we gave people during this period credit for. But they were still very much eating wild plants, including cereals like wheat and barley, and there is no indication for morphological changes leading toward domestication. In other words, they were harvesting the grains, just not planting them.

There is even new evidence from Amud cave in Israel that Neanderthals were eating wild cereals (barley) some 60,000 years ago! So it is very much a long-standing tradition.

It seems that everyone was perfectly content to let nature provide them with wild food, until the Natufian Culture settled into village life some 12,000 years ago. They weren’t farming yet, but the combination of demographic and environmental pressure forced them to either die-off, or devise a way to get more out of nature than nature provides naturally. So after thousands of years of messing-around with wheat and barley, it was a very logical step to actually start planting the cereals in a garden. Thus we have Jericho, then the origins of civilization in Mesopotamia.

[Q.]

Professor, you da man!

Cool stuff!