Posted on 06/19/2006 1:04:07 PM PDT by blam
Jun. 18, 2006 0:24 | Updated Jun. 18, 2006 10:45
11,000-year-old grain shakes up beliefs on beginnings of agriculture
By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
Bar-Ilan University researchers have found a cache of 120,000 wild oat and 260,000 wild barley grains at the Gilgal archaeological site near Jericho that date back 11,000 years - providing evidence of cultivation during the Neolithic Period.
The research, performed by Drs. Ehud Weiss and Anat Hartmann of BIU's department of Land of Israel studies and Prof. Mordechai Kislev of the faculty of life sciences, appears in the June 16 edition of the prestigious journal Science.
It is the second time in two weeks that Kislev and Hartmann have had an article in Science. They recently wrote about their discovery of 10,000-year-old cultivated figs at the same Jordan Valley site.
According to the researchers, the newest find shows that the transition from nomadic food gathering and the beginning of agriculture were quite different than previously thought. Until now, the general assumption has been that agriculture was begun by a single line of human efforts in one specific area. But the BIU researchers found a much more complicated effort undertaken by different human populations in different regions, drawing a completely new picture of the origins of agriculture.
Agriculture, the BIU researchers suggest, originated through human manipulations of wild plants - sometimes involving the same species - that took place in various spatially and temporally distinct communities. Moreover, some of these occasions were found to be much earlier than previously thought possible.
(Excerpt) Read more at jpost.com ...
That looks like a can of brake fluid.
Also, you don't need to "add" yeast - yeast floats around in the air as a naturally occuring substance. Leave some soaked grains around long enough and yeast will find it and grow on it. I would imagine that's where beer got it's start.
A week or two ago, I looked up from cooking when someone on TV news said there was pot growing on the front lawn of a state house or town hall . . . looked urban but Ididn't catch where. Apparently, they'd dug the lawn up to redo it and rains came before they got any further. When the sun came out, there were pot seedlings all over the place!
They're from WWII's Hemp for the cause, or whatever it was called. From 60 years ago, my brief peek looked like damn good germination rate.
Don't count on it. Those unfortunate enough to get the kind with seeds love to spread them on police station/city hall lawns and in potted plants inside the station. Or so I'm told...
Which makes sense, yeast is more likely to infect a wort than dough.
Probaly, just some old acid heads letting their grain go moldy.
Johnny Pot Seed strikes again! LOL!
I'm just saying what the people who are there said.
Someone failed to sow their wild oats.
I can't decide if this explains lite beer, or the later Schlitz.
Someone cooked the barley and then let it sit in the pot.
Liquid+starch+fermentation=Ethanol.
It's the same process of making sour dough breads...
Yeast floating in the air innoculate the moist dough.
Good stuff. It will do for breakfast.
yuck! frosty mud?!
i'll stick with a Guinness...
"nings Of Agriculture, Red Badger wrote:
How does one "discover" beer? Wine I can see. Grape juice, sits in storage till it ferments and viola, you've got wine. Beer, on the other hand, requires a scientific approach to brewing ingredients, cooking, fermenting, etc. One does not accidentally come upon beer, it must be planned and researched........."
For what we would call modern, drinkable beer true. We have the medieval scholastic monks to thank for that...most all of what we now know as beer came from their experimentation.
However, just a fermented grain drink...requires no great science. Leave some grain in a container (even a hole in rock) of water for a few days, strain out the grain, and the result is beer. Easier almost than wine. Not very potable by our standards, but in neolithic times, I'm sure lovely. Archeologically, "beer" just means a brew from fermented grains, not Bitberger Pilsener, or Chimay Red, hence to be a basic beer, doesn't mean what we know of as beer today.
Besides usually the craftsmenship of the ancient world is greater than we imagine. They may well have had a potable grain beverage (beer) that we would find delicious.
In King Midas' tomb, the remnents of the evaporated beverage s in the chalices were analyzed...finding a sophisticated brewed mix of grape must, honey, and barley all brewed together (like a combination of wine, mead and beer...but not mixed, but fermented at the same time). I've had Dogfish Head brewery's attempt at recreating it, and it is a very delicious beerwinemead...which doesn't fit any category of taste I've known. We shouldn't think the ancients as tasteless!
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