Posted on 06/01/2006 5:48:33 PM PDT by blam
Was fig first fruit of man's agricultural endeavours?
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 02/06/2006)
The dawn of agriculture may have come with the domestication of fig trees near Jericho some 11,400 years ago, archaeologists report today.
The discovery of ancient carbonised figs suggests that fruit, rather than grains that are traditionally thought to have heralded agriculture, may yield the earliest evidence of purposeful planting.
The figs date back roughly 1,000 years before wheat, barley and legumes were domesticated in the region, making the fruit trees the oldest known domesticated crop, a team reports today in the journal Science.
Nine small figs and 313 fig fragments were found at -Gilgal I, a village in the Lower Jordan Valley, eight miles north of ancient Jericho, known to have been inhabited for some 200 years before being abandoned roughly 11,200 years ago.
"This is the oldest evidence for deliberate planting of a food-producing plant, as opposed to just gathering food in the wild," says Prof Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University in Canberra.
The find is all the more remarkable because the figs sat ignored for decades. They were collected in the 1970s and 1980s but were forgotten after the Israeli archaeologist who led the excavation died.
Then the Israel Museum in Jerusalem invited Prof Ofer Bar-Yosef, a Harvard University archaeologist, to study the finds.
Today Prof Bar-Yosef and Prof Mordechai Kislev and Anat Hartmann of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan announce how the figs have a remarkable story to tell about the history of mankind.
"Eleven thousand years ago there was a critical switch in the human mind - from exploiting the earth as it is to actively changing the environment to suit our needs," says Prof Bar-Yosef.
"People decided to intervene in nature and supply their own food rather than relying on what was provided by the gods. This shift to a sedentary lifestyle grounded in the growing of wild crops such as barley and wheat marked a dramatic change from 2.5 million years of human history as mobile hunter-gatherers."
The carbonised figs were not distorted, suggesting that they may have been dried for human consumption. Similar fig drupelets were found at a second site about a mile west of Gilgal.
The scientists compared the ancient figs with modern wild and domesticated variants and determined that they were a mutant selectively propagated by local people.
In this variety of fig, known as parthenocarpic, the fruit develops without insect pollination and is prevented from falling off the tree, allowing it to ripen.
However, because such figs do not produce seeds, they are a reproductive dead end unless humans interfere by planting shoots from the parthenocarpic trees.
"Once the parthenocarpic mutation occurred, humans must have recognised that the resulting fruits do not produce new trees and fig tree cultivation became a common practice," Prof Bar-Yosef says. "In this intentional act of planting a specific variant of fig tree, we can see the beginnings of agriculture. This edible fig would not have survived if not for human intervention."
The mutation responsible for this parthenocarpic variety arises on some fig trees, but relatively infrequently. The abundance of the fig remains therefore implies that humans recognised these rare trees and propagated them by planting branches.
Ease of planting may explain why figs were domesticated some five millennia before other fruit trees, such as the grape, olive and date.
Prof Bar-Yosef says: "The reported Gilgal figs, stored together with other staples such as wild barley, wild oat and acorns, indicate that the subsistence strategy of these early Neolithic farmers was a mixed exploitation of wild plants and initial fig domestication."
GGG Ping.
nope , it was the Apple ..... ;^)
Up until now, the "fact" that grains were the first agricultural food was a scientific "fact".
Suddenly, overnight, it fades into the realm of "mistaken belief".
Aside from the jokes of global warming and indians in reservations being America's true and original owners, there are myriad other such "facts" that turn out not to be facts at all...
They may have been, but the obscurity of that fact is a tribute to the power of the Wheat and Legume Lobby.
"The Compleat Meadmaker" by Ken Schramm, suggests that hunter-gatherers might have collected honey as a source of high sugar, compact (and yummy) food, and, in placing it in a skin bag (possibly the paleolithic equivalent of a canteen) discovered... fermentation!
Passed around the ol' campfire at the end of a long day, our ancestors might have, uh, warmed themselves" for the last couple of hundred thousand years...
He speculates (gently) that any time an organism uses a food (or booze) for long enough, it becomes part of the 'necessary' ingredients for health, happiness and long life!
BTW if you haven't tried Mead, don't knock it! The good stuff is REALLY good. The bad stuff, sadly, is warm old Milwaukee lite drunk out of a rusty can.
Literally the difference between an old White Owl and an imported long-leaf corona!
Interesting that cloning occurred so early in agriculture. There are probably a number of other fruit trees that were cloned before the fig.
The first thing cultivated after the Great Flood was grapes.
Noah liked to get drunk.
Didn't Adam always wear a fig leaf?
And it took this long for them to figure this out? Sheese! :)
Actually, the idea that the unidentified fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was an apple is a Western European invention. Orthodox Christian tradition holds that it was a fig, and that it was for this reason that only the fig tree would offer leaves to Adam and Eve to clothe their nakedness--the rest of creation having recoiled in horror, but the fig tree, having participated in our ancestral disobedience, having pity on our state.
Hmmm, necessity was the mother of invention.
And if you don't like that, you won't like pure science.
But you can still be an engineer. ;^)
Trained eyes, and microscopes.
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This is interesting. I have always wondered why the archeologists thought that man was too stupid to realize they could plant and grow many food plants.
It would make sense. Fig trees are so easy to plant and require little to no maintenance so hunter-gatherers could plant the seeds and move on, coming back over the years to gather. Wheat/spelt would require some rather advanced agricultural advances for hunter-gatherers and would probably mean they had to be in a relatively fixed location.
If someone buried a cache of fruit or grains for later, and they sprouted, then it wouldn't take much to figure it out.
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