Natural Science Forum / Biology / Paleontology / June 2004

Farming origins gain 10,000 years
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.

From the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3826731.stm