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.
Not sure. Here's where I go that one.
you may like this.
Thanks! That might shake the Bering Strait hypothesis up a bit. . .
"Dr. Solomon Katz theorizes that when man learned to ferment grain into beer more than 10,000 years ago, it became one of his most important sources of nutrition. Beer gave people protein that unfermented grain couldn't supply. And besides, it tasted a whole lot better than the unfermented grain did.Mmmm ... beerBut in order to have a steady supply of beer, it was necessary to have a steady supply of beer's ingredients. Man had to give up his nomadic ways, settle down, and begin farming. And once he did, civilization was just a stone's throw away. "
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The way I heard it, it was the other way around. Agriculture leads to more babies.
Wow, I must have read really old books there. I didn't realize it's less effective to catch a rabbit than an elephant, or more strenuous to weave a trap and snare a rabbit than to eat it, but easier to hunt big game and eat it.
How many would pay to push a plow around a field all day?
You've just created the latest Reality TV show!
Also the big game sometimes hunt back. Rabbits, (expect for the sub species "Lepus Montyus,") aren't generally dangerous.
Same applies to fishing and clamming and all the other great pursuits you can enjoy in shallow waters and swamps.
Indeed, big game are dangerous. In most primitive groups, if they had a choice, they probably left big game hunting to special occasions. Not worth losing or crippling a man.
The pyramid at Chan Chan is one of the largest earthen structures in the world. Chimu culture, Peru. I believe there are a few others down that way.
Whoops, zombie thread, sorry.
ping for later
No worries -- zombies can be revitalised!
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First farmers discoveredThe first farmers grew wheat and rye 13,000 years ago in Syria and were forced into cultivating crops by a terrible drought, according to UK archaeologists.
BBC
Thursday, October 28, 1999
Professor Gordon Hillman, at University College London, has spent over 20 years investigating the remains of ancient food plants at a unique site at Abu Hureyra, in the middle Euphrates.
"Nowhere else has an unbroken sequence of archaeological evidence stretching from hunter-gatherer times to full-blown farming," he told BBC News Online.
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Oldest evidence for processing of wild cereals:
starch grains from barley, wheat, on grinding stone
Public release date: 4-Aug-2004
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/si-oef080204.php
Researchers find signs of grain milling, baking 23,000 years ago
Public release date: 28-Sep-2004
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-09/hu-rfs092804.php
Galilee Drought Uncovers Oldest Village In The World
Sunday Times (UK) | 9-23-2001 | Dina Shiloh
Posted on 09/24/2001 1:40:07 PM PDT by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/531364/posts
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