11,000-Year-Old Grain Shakes Up Beliefs On Beginnings Of Agriculture

Jerusalem Post ^ | 6-18-2006 | Judy Siegel-Itzkovich

[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.

[Red Badger]

Spontaneous Fermentation? Is that like The Immaculate Transubstantiation?.............

[Red Badger]

Johnny Marijuana Seed had been by there in olden times.........67-72.................8^)........

[zeugma]

Ah, yes---beer---"Proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Benjamin Franklin

Actually Master Franklin was close to the truth, but not quite there.

There are, in fact, three things that prove both the existance of G-d, and that he wants us to be happy:

1. Beer
2. Chocolate
3. Coffee

 

[Wonder Warthog]

"There are, in fact, three things that prove both the existance of G-d, and that he wants us to be happy--beer, chocolate, coffee",p> True, but beer was the one he gave us FIRST.

[zeugma]

True, but beer was the one he gave us FIRST.

That's because He loves us!;-)

[Lady Jag]

If the world is as it seems, there will always be Johnny PotSeeds roaming the earth.

[teeman8r]

i think i just sinned thinking about drinking the bath water of a nun and saint... so many things to comment on like maundy Thirsty... to paschal time...

cheers

teeman

[teeman8r]

and another thing... is this what lies ahead for the new seed depository in the arctic... some guy digging it up 10,000 years from now and wondering if they'll germinate... seems we can save some bucks and just use all these seeds...

it'll turn out they didn't plant these seeds because they caused a plague to the fields so they hid them in an underground cache so no one would sow them... how lucky are we....

teeman

[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

[PapaBear3625]

I always thought making wine and mead was much more complicated. I've made beer for years but when I read a book on wine making I thought it was pretty fussy.

Making GOOD wine is a fussy process.

Making fermented grape juice which will give you some sort of buzz is not.