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Clemson's first harvest of ancient Southern wheat exceeds expectations
Posted on 06/22/2016 11:55:17 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Study of 44 ancient Middle Eastern genomes supports idea of independent farming revolutions in the Fertile Crescent.
Two Middle Eastern populations independently developed farming and then spread the technology to Europe, Africa and Asia, according to the genomes of 44 people who lived thousands of years ago in present-day Armenia, Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Iran.
...the research supports archaeological evidence about the multiple origins of farming, and represents the first detailed look at the ancestry of the individuals behind one of the most important periods in human history — the Neolithic revolution.
Some 11,000 years ago, humans living in the ancient Middle East region called the Fertile Crescent shifted from a nomadic existence, based on hunting game and gathering wild plants, to a more sedentary lifestyle that would later give rise to permanent settlements. Over thousands of years, these early farmers domesticated the first crops and transformed sheep, wild boars and other creatures into domestic animals.
Dozens of studies have examined the genetics of the first European farmers, who emigrated from the Middle East beginning some 8,000 years ago, but the hot climes of the Fertile Crescent had made it difficult to obtain ancient DNA from remains found there. Advances in extracting DNA from a tiny ear bone called the petrous allowed a team led by Iosif Lazaridis and David Reich, population geneticists at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, to analyse the genomes of the 44 Middle Eastern individuals, who lived between 14,000 and 3,500 years ago.
The team found stark differences between the genomes of Neolithic individuals from the southern Levant region, including Israel and Jordan, and those living across the Zagros Mountains in western Iran. The Zagros early farmers were instead more closely related to nearby hunter-gatherers who lived in the region before the Neolithic.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
Common sense is precluded by DNA differences?
Need grains for... beer...
BF = Before Flood
AF = After Flood
Adam was the first farmer.
——wild boars——
At what point did pigs become taboo in the very area said to have domesticated them?
I don’tr think we know why the Bible in what 1800 bc, and Mohamed 1200 years later declared pigs forbidden
Invented, huh. Birds do it naturally.
so what is the dna tale on inbreeding in the ME?
All not long after extinction of the cave lion, around the extinction of the Etruscan bear, cave hyena and saber toothed cat (Homotherium). So, humans ran less, and could rest long enough to watch things grow. Human populations increased with predators less present.
When Jesus forced the multitude ofor spirits out of the man, and into pigs who then hurled themselves over a cliff, they became forbidden.
Good points -- probably had something to do with systematic destruction of those large, dangerous predators. The Romans liked to use bears in their games, and an African species which was a big favorite no longer exists as a consequence. Whoops..
Bees also. Even educated fleas.
The Big Old Mo plagiarized the food laws from Judaism.
The kosher beasts have to go on the hoof and chew their cud — chickens are okay, fish are ok.
Pork and human flesh are said to be indistinguishable — I’d be surprised if that wasn’t a big reason for the restriction against pork.
now that is a very interesting fact. I had always assumed the taboo was trichinosis related
For the most part, the food laws were there to keep cultural separation from surrounding people, and probably got some kind of start during the centuries of captivity in Egypt. It’s very unlikely that they had any idea about trichinosis.
Exactly. Look - as humans our killer app is that we can run long distance while being able to cool. Another is that we can work cooperatively in a group to fend off a larger, faster and more powerful predators by using music. Just look at a Maori Haka as ask yourself whether big cat might view the whole group as a threat larger than any one human.
So, to me, all this thought that Holocene megafauna extinction somehow has a anthropogenic origin is ridiculous. The innovation of farming came about as a result of the extinction event, not human conduct causing the extinction. Thinking that we humans are so powerful chokes off thought directed at examining larger forces.
How much though has been put in academia to increased incidence of solar particle events and solar activity that corresponds to the Megafaunal Extinction? To the fact that there is a C-14 anomaly at the Younger Dryas/Allerod boundary? To the fact that there are increased Beryllium-10 deposition rates while the extinction was taking place?
No, nothing happenng here. It must be that humans hunted the Megafauna to extinction. I am not a scientist, but looking to anthropogenic origin just seems to be bad science and a fetish.
ok - </rant>
Not to mention, when critters got scarce, so did the food supply, hence, farming becomes important.
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