Posted on 06/23/2004 4:42:34 PM PDT by blam
Farming origins gain 10,000 years
Wild types of emmer wheat like those found at Ohalo were forerunners of today's varieties
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.
They did go every where.
"Fascinating. I'm going to order that book."
You may consider Schoch's book also. He extends Opperhiemer's ideas and references his work in Voyages Of The Pyramid Builders. It's an easy read as compared to Eden In The East.
Voyages of the Pyramid Builders
Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D. discusses in this book, not only the geographic diversity and cultural of similarity of pyramids all around the world, but discusses how that technology would travel across oceans in the Ancient world. The pictures, bibliography, and read are worth the price of the book. This is a comprehensive study, the only book you will need on this subject. The links between ancient Hebrews, Old Testament Prophets, and the building of the pyramids, is precious a must have for those who are interested in pyramids around the world or in America before Columbus.
Is it a mere coincidence that pyramids are found across our globe? Did cultures ranging across vast spaces in geography and time, such as the ancient Egyptians; early Buddhists; the Maya, Inca, Toltec, and Aztec civilizations of the Americas; the Celts of the British Isles; and even the Mississippi Indians of pre-Columbian Illinois, simply dream the same dreams and envision the same structures?
Scientist and tenured university professor Robert M. Schoch-one of the world's preeminent geologists in recasting the date of the Great Sphinx-believes otherwise. In this dramatic and meticulously reasoned book, Schoch, like anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl in his classic Kon-Tiki, argues that ancient cultures traveled great distances by sea. Indeed, he believes that primeval sailors traveled from the Eastern continent, primarily Southeast Asia, and spread the idea of pyramids across the Earth, involving the human species in a far greater degree of contact and exchange than experts have previously thought possible.
Voyages of the Pyramid Builders features sixteen pages of color photos and a special appendix, "Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza," in which Schoch provides his most up-to-date evidence of the Sphinx's older origins.
Is there reason not to expect that all these folks were trading during the Ice Age?
The largest and oldest pyramid ever discovered is in this hemisphere, Peru I believe.
Here (click) is a map of the world with the water lowered by a little over 300ft. (some say it was 500ft). Some things to notice: The Mediterranean is in two, possibly, three sections, the Red Sea is land locked (and probably dried up) and the Persian Gulf is completely dry. If the people from SE Asia sailed into the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf or the Red Sea, they did it after most of the flooding was over. As the ice began to melt, the 'dams' in the Mediterranean would have broken, one-by-one...finally resulting in the Black Sea flood (Noah's Flood?) 7,600 years ago, not out of line with some accepted dates. Similar 'dam' breaking would have occured in the Persian Gulf, Red Sea and many other places around the globe.
I think one of the biggest thing most of us over look is the 'weight-shifting' that occurred as a consequence of the ice melting. There would have been massive catastrophies everywhere: Volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides (land and sea), tsunamis and very unpredictiable weather worldwide.
LOL, that's Robert Schoch's list...not mine. Interesting book, you ought to check it out. He does a pretty good job of tying all the pyramid builders of the world together.
I've never heard of any Peruvian pyramids. Say, a big thank you for all of your posts, I find them incredibly fascinating and very very informative. THANK YOU!!
The regular (non-U.K.) Amazon link for Eden in the East is here.
Privately, they admit that things must be older than they appear...
When Humboldt made his trip around Tierra del Fuego, he described two completely different people in the area. One was short, stocky and lightly dressed and one was tall and slender and heavily dressed. The stocky people relied on resources from the sea and the tall people used the land resources. He describes one incident where a lightly clothed, nursing mother, came alongside their ship (anchored) in a canoe and sleet was dripping off the baby's head and the mother's bare shoulders and breasts with no apparent ill effects. We've got people from everywhere, going everywhere.
That map you linked is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time.
You're welcome. I enjoy trying to tie all the pieces together with some serious speculating. I have zero credentials in this area so when I get 'called' on my speculating, lol, I just bail-out by saying, "I'm a retired chip-maker...what do you expect. " (Ahem)
It is a neat map. Now, take it down another 100-200ft and I think you'll see the Gulf Of Mexico become landlocked also. That could possibly explain the underwater structures found off the coast of Cuba... they were built on the shoreline of a dessicated Gulf Of Mexico before it reflooded.(?)
"Cholula: The Pyramid of Tipanipa, "The Worlds Largest Pyramid!" For years the "Pyramid of Tipanipa" at Cholula was said to be the worlds largest pyramid. Not even the Great Pyramid of Egypt, had a larger base!
"Now, there is another located in the ancient ruins of El Mirador in Guatemala. El Mirador covers 10 square mile and its largest pyramid is called The Danta Pyramid. Rising 230 feet, The Danta Pyramid is said to be the tallest structure the Maya ever built."
"Even so, that still does not take away from the fact that Cholula is pretty big! After all it covers 25 acres and it is 181 feet high. That still makes it the largest base for any pyramid structure."
Maybe, but you sure have to pile the ice pretty deep onshore to lower the overall sea level that much. I guess it's possible.
They say it was miles high even in the northern US.
It had to be pretty thick to do what it did at Yosemite, and that is rather far south.
Are there any more loops where you found that one? There were other ice sheets than just the Canadian, and did that just cut off at Greenland?
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