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A team of archeologists working in Jordan has made a discovery that represents a new chapter in the story of our ancestors' move from foraging to farming. The researchers unearthed an ancient granary. The round, mud hut dates back more than 11,000 years. A raised floor was key for keeping grain dry and out of reach of hungry rats. But what makes the find so special is that the granary was built a thousand years before people ate domesticated crops. The report appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers found caches of wild barley and oats inside the structure. Such evidence of a dedicated food-storage edifice has never been recorded from the pre-pottery Neolithic age. The investigators say this selective cultivation and management of wild plants shows behaviors that led to agriculture. What’s more, the granaries were built in-between houses and buildings used for food processing, which led to the establishment of more permanent settlements. By stockpiling a food surplus, our predecessors produced a new societal structure and curbed their wandering ways. Which then led to today’s foraging for junk food in supermarket aisles.
—Adam Hinterthuer
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5 Comments
Add CommentIt is interesting that wild grains have been discovered in the pre-pottery Neolithic. However, archaeologists have long identified that period as one of increasingly permanent and growing villages and the appearance of domesticated grain crops. What is unique about the pre-pottery Neolithic is as it's title implies: this was done in the absence of ceramic vessels, considered a key (and some would say necessary) technology for storing, transporting, and processing (eg., cooking) wheats and barleys. There are examples of the use of gypsum plaster vessels at this time, however.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGranaries before agriculture suggests that Jane Jacobs may have been on to something, After her famous study of the life and death of cities, she wrote a book suggesting that cities predated and occasioned the development agriculture, rather than the conventional wisdom that agriculture made cities possible. I believe Jacob's thesis has been ignored. So, for that matter, was plate techtonics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is the definition of domesticated grains? how long did it take to move from gather and store naturally grown to plant, gather and store farming?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs an old farmer, I think farming had started when dedicated permanent storage constructs were created. With hand gathering enough grain would be lost to replant with or without cultivation.We call that volunter grain rather then planted, in the right soils this works quite well. Believe me no one that has hand gathered grain would deliberately throw it out into a field if they did not have to. The only reason to seed a field is to start a new field. After that, as long as the field was cared for, replanting would not be needed.
Before an archaeologist makes determinations about farming maybe they should talk to a farmer.
Tens of thousands of years ago, central australia was covered with forests. The aborigene people regularly burnt it down, so as to favourise the type of game they found the best to hunt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is not only a form of early land husbandry, but also climate engineering! It would therefore be a limited view to say that man modified his environment to enhace food supplies only ten thousand years ago.
This is makes sense. New eras didn't always come on as fast as we're used to. The general rate of progress was much slower then. For instance, the theoretical foundation for computers was laid in the first half of the twentieth century and the transistor was invented in 1947. Computers didn't really make to the consumer market until the late 70s and really didn't come to dominate everything until the 90s. It was probably the same thing with agriculture but obviously the time scale was way longer because of the slow general rate of progress back then.
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