Figs were grown before cereal crops in Israel.

Ancient Fig Find May Push Back Birth of Agriculture

Scott Norris
for National Geographic News

June 1, 2006
An assortment of 11,400-year-old figs found in Israel may be the fruit of the world’s earliest form of agriculture, scientists say.

Archaeologists from Israel and the United States say the find suggests Stone Age humans may have been cultivating fruit trees a thousand years before the domestication of cereal grains and legumes, such as peas and beans.

“Previously, the oldest cultivated fruits were thought to be olives and grapes found in the eastern Mediterranean that were dated at about 6,000 years old.

Researchers behind the new study discovered the ancient figs at the Gilgal archaeological site in the Jordan Valley near the city of Jericho (see map of Israel.)

The nine carbonized figs were small but ripe and showed signs of having been dried for human consumption.

The finding adds a new twist to the story of agricultural origins.

The so-called agricultural revolution—when ancient humans began to domesticate crops—is now increasingly seen as a long and multifaceted transition, as humans gradually shifted from scattered planting of wild grains to farming with domesticated varieties.

Early-agriculture specialist Mordechai Kislev, of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, says fig cultivation may amount to a previously unknown phase of this transition, fitting between the sowing of wild grains and the raising of domesticated cereal crops.

“Domestication of the fig seems to comprise a new stage,” Kislev said.

Kislev is the lead author of the new study, along with Anat Hartmann, also of Bar-Ilan, and Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University.

The researchers report their findings in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Science

The researchers’ case that the Gilgal fruits were deliberately cultivated rests on an idiosyncrasy of fig genetics.

Normally, pollination by specialized wasps is required for fig trees to bear edible fruit.

Occasionally, however, a mutation occurs that allows fruit to develop from unfertilized female flowers, a process known as parthenocarpy.

Some figs grown commercially today are of this variety. Apparently, so were the Stone Age figs at Gilgal.

Microscopic analysis revealed that the figs lacked embryonic seeds, a distinguishing feature of the mutant form, in which fruit are produced without pollination.

“The mutation does not survive in nature more than a single generation,” Kislev said.

That means the fig trees at Gilgal could not have been reproducing naturally.

The large cache of fruit fragments recovered from the site suggests that humans were maintaining the mutant trees by planting live branches in the ground.

Kislev says fig trees are particularly amenable to this common horticultural technique, called vegetative propagation.

Additional fig remains have been recovered from other sites throughout the Middle East, and at least some appear to be of the Gilgal variety.

To Kislev, this suggests that choice trees were being transported and planted to increase agricultural yield at different locations.

Constant Gardeners

“The early propagation of fig trees, if true, has a rather important effect on the way we view the Neolithic [or Late Stone Age],” said archaeologist Joy McCorriston, of Ohio State University in Columbus.

The Neolithic is a loosely dated period of cultural development marked by the invention of agriculture, improved stone stools, and sedentary village life.

McCorriston notes that although planting shoots of fig trees may be simple, early fig farmers would have had to wait several years for their reward.

This suggests relatively long-term ties to land and perhaps new social and economic arrangements prior to the full-scale adoption of an agricultural lifestyle.

“Ownership of trees [may have] provided a way of mapping society onto physical space,” McCorriston said.

As objects of long-term interest and care, fig trees may also have had symbolic significance.

Archaeologist Bruce Smith of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., says early fig cultivation is indicative of a general atmosphere of experimentation following the last ice age.

“Human societies were auditioning a wide range of species” for a role in the unfolding drama of agriculture, Smith said.

There’s a link to the abstract here.

This would be inthe very last days Natufian era, just as they were winding down. The Naufians had some population affinities to Nubian populations, but by this point in time this was being diluted to the point of being undetectable by input from other Eurasian populations; after the Natufian era no sub Saharan affinities are seen (C Loring Brace) and no Sub Saharan affinities are seen in any other Neolithic population of the time, including North Africa. The 11,000 BP is the point in time when Israel starts moving into the pre pottery Neolithic (PPN), and probably marks the point at which expanding proto-agriculturalists from Turkey reached Israel. 

I’ve seen a few indications that trees were planted before any other crops… hazelnuts in northern Europe, pistachio and almond in Turkey/Armenia. It’s a only small step for a hunter gatherer to stick a few nuts in the ground; either as some sort of religious rite or from the realisation that the more nut trees he plants the more nuts there will be when his kids grow up.

The order of domestication, (my best guess): nut trees at some very ancient time, then pulses about 15,000 years ago in Turkey, reaching Franchthi cave  (Greece) about 13,500 BP. Cultivated cereals turn up about 2,000 years later in Franchthi, even wild cereals are 500 years later than the nuts and pulses. I guess figs were probably in orchards before domesticated grains reached the middle east.

Oldest agriculture in Northern Atlantic Spain.

The oldest agriculture in northern Atlantic Spain: new evidence from El Mirón Cave (Ramales de la Victoria, Cantabria)

Leonor Peña-Chocarroa, Lydia Zapatab, Maria Jose Iriarteb, Manuel González Moralesc and Lawrence Guy Strausd, ,

aLaboratorio de Arqueobotánica, Instituto de Historia, CSIC, C/ Duque de Medinaceli 6, 28014 Madrid, Spain bArea de Prehistoria, Universidad del Pais Vasco, 01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain cInstituto de Prehistoria, Universidad de Cantabria, Avda. de los Castros, 39005 Santander, Spain dDepartment of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA

Received 2 November 2004;  revised 2 December 2004.  Available online 16 February 2005.

Abstract
Emmer wheat (Triticum diccocum) has been positively identified from the stratigraphically oldest ceramic- and domesticated livestock-bearing level of El Mirón Cave in the Cantabrian Cordillera. The grain is AMS 14C-dated to 5550±40 BP. This date is congruent with six others from the same layer, higher within which were found other grains of wheat, including einkorn as well as emmer. Although wild ungulates (mainly red deer) were still hunted, abundant ovicaprines, together with small numbers of cattle and pigs, appear in this level-for the first time in the 40,000-year record at El Mirón. Potsherds (undecorated, but of very good quality) also appear abruptly and abundantly. However, the associated lithic assemblage contains specific tool types also found in late Mesolithic contexts in Cantabrian Spain. In addition to the full suite of Neolithic indicators at El Mirón, as confirmed by less unambiguous early agro-pastoral evidence from other sites in the Vasco-Cantabrian region, there are megalithic monuments both in the vicinity of the cave and throughout the region that are similarly dated. All these data tend to suggest that Neolithic adaptations—already present about a millennium earlier not only along the Mediterranean coast, but also much closer, to the southeast of the Cordillera—were quickly adopted as “a package” by Cantabrian Mesolithic foragers, possibly as a consequence of social contacts with Neolithic groups in southern France and/or the upper Ebro basin of north-central Spain.

Animal domestication is older than previously thought

NY times article

Like this surprises me much, I’ve said before that it was older than claimed. At least this map agrees with my points of domestication (I did something similar a few months ago). I’ve always maintained Southern Turkey was the origin point of the Western Neolithic revolution.

The invention of agriculture was a pivotal event in human history, but archaeologists studying its origins may have made a simple error in dating the domestication of animals like sheep and goats. The signal of the process, they believed, was the first appearance in the archaeological record of smaller boned animals. But in fact this reflects just a switch to culling females, which are smaller than males, concludes Melinda Zeder, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution.

Using a different criterion, that of when herds first show signs of human management, Dr. Zeder finds that goats and sheep were first domesticated about 11,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought, with pigs and cattle following shortly afterwards. The map, from her article in the August 11 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows the regions and dates where the four species were first domesticated. Other dates, color-coded as to species, show where domesticated animals first appear elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent.

The earlier dates mean that animals were domesticated at much the same time as crop plants, and bear on the issue of how this ensemble of new agricultural species – the farming package known as the Neolithic revolution – spread from the Near East to Europe.

Some experts say the technology spread by cultural diffusion, others that the first farmers themselves moved into Europe, bringing their new technology with them and displacing the resident hunter gatherers.

Dr. Zeder concludes that both processes were involved. A test case is the island of Cyprus, where the four domesticated species of livestock appear as early as 10,500 years ago, replacing native fauna such as pygmy elephants and pygmy hippopotamuses (large animals often get downsized in island settings).

Since Cyprus lies 60 kilometers off the Turkish coast, the suite of agricultural species must have been brought there on boats by the new farmers. That establishes one episode of colonization, and Dr. Zeder sees evidence for several others. The second map shows, in red circles, the dates when farming colonists’ enclaves were set up around the Mediterranean.

Dr. Zeder believes that in France and Spain the indigenous hunter gatherers adopted the new farming technology by cultural diffusion (shown as green dots). The farmers themselves settled the regions that are now Turkey and the Balkans (red dots) but in surrounding areas they integrated with indigenous peoples (blue dots).

Dr. Zeder says her evidence indicates that several waves of settlers spread the new farming technology through the Mediterranean. It’s yet not known what drove the expansion, or what the relationship was between the colonists and the native inhabitants. Studies of ancient DNA, she said, may help test her thesis that farming spread through a mix of colonization and cultural diffusion.

The logic that is used to observe the livestock arriving in Cyprus is similar to my dating of agriculture arriving at Francthi cave; essentially multiple crop plants make a simulaneous appearance in Francthi cave about 11,000 years ago (500 years before cereals are seen).

A nicely dated map/timeline of the expansion of farming (well, it’s a bit out, as Francthi in Greece was 11,000 BP)

I’m feeling moderately smug now. Told ’em so.

Oldest Egyptian farming site found in Lower Egypt.

Egypt’s Earliest Farming Village Found

 Steven Stanek in Cairo for National Geographic Magazine

The 7,000-year-old farming-village site includes evidence of domesticated animals and crops—providing a major breakthrough in understanding the enigmatic people of the Neolithic, or late Stone Age, period and their lives long before the appearance of the Egyptian pharaohs.

 The discoveries were made as a team of Dutch and U.S. archaeologists dug deeper into a previously excavated mound of sand concealing the ancient village in the Faiyum depression, a fertile oasis region about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Cairo.

Just centimeters beneath the modern plowed surface, in an area that had been used until recently to grow grapes, the researchers discovered evidence of structures, such as clay floors, and hearths containing homegrown wheat grain and barley. Also unearthed were the remains of sheep, goats, and pigs—which, along with the grains, were imported from the Middle East.

These finds could add a new chapter to the history of Egypt’s contact with foreign cultures in pre-pharaonic times.

Radiocarbon dating places the occupation of the site to around 5200 B.C. But details about the lifestyle of the farmers who used those granaries and tools remained a mystery until now.

The Faiyum “is important because it provides the first evidence of farming that we have in Egypt,” said the excavation’s co-director Willeke Wendrich, an associate professor of Egyptian archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“For the first time, we have domesticated wheat and barley in a domestic context.”

This would place the entry of agriculture into Northern Egypt at something like 8,000 years or less, a little later than areas like Serbia and Bulgaria. This would seem to support a more Northerly origin for agriculture than the Levant, as you’ll often see in print. Turkey is now considered to be more likely to be the birthplace of Western farming, as the DNA studies of domesticates generally lead back to there.

BTW, there is a good link to a named map of Egyptian sites if you click on the map.

Koreans, the worlds first farmers.

World’s ‘oldest’ rice found

By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor Rice was on the menu for ancient man Scientists have found the oldest known domesticated rice. The handful of 15,000-year-old burnt grains was discovered by archaeologists in Korea. Their age challenges the accepted view that rice cultivation originated in China about 12,000 years ago. The rice is genetically different from the modern food crop, which will allow researchers to trace its evolution. Today’s rice is the primary food for over half the world’s population, with 576,280,000 tonnes produced in 2002. Rice is especially important in Asia, where it is responsible for almost a third of all calorific intake. Tracer of evolution The oldest known rice was discovered by Lee Yung-jo and Woo Jong-yoon of Chungbuk National University in South Korea. The rice DNA will aid evolution study They found the ancient grains during excavations in the village of Sorori in the Chungbuk Province. Radioactive dating of the 59 grains of carbonised rice has pushed back the date for the earliest known cultivation of the plant. DNA analysis shows the early rice sample to be different from the modern intensively farmed varieties, thereby offering scientists the opportunity to study the evolution of one of the world’s principal food sources. The region in central Korea where the grains were found is one of the most important sites for understanding the development of Stone Age man in Asia.

So I guess the Natufians weren’t the first then.

It has to be remembered that prior to 10,000 years ago, the best land would have been river estuaries, and they are now under about 100m of water, so it’s unlikely we’ll ever know who the first farmers really were.