Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Evidence of Proto-Farming 23,000 Years Ago On Sea Of Galilee

Plant remains recovered from a sedentary fishing hunter-gather camp on the Sea of Galilee from 23,000 years ago shows that proto-farming of wild type crops was conducted at the site and that the cereals were processed to produce flour.

The source is: Ainit Snir, Dani Nadel, Iris Groman-Yaroslavski, Yoel Melamed, Marcelo Sternberg, Ofer Bar-Yosef, Ehud Weiss. The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long Before Neolithic Farming. PLOS ONE, 2015; 10 (7): e0131422 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0131422

Since these were wild types of the plants that would be later domesticated, this sedentary farming of these plants would not have sustained the farmers without the supplementation from the fishing that made sedentary living at the camp possible, and other hunting and gathering activities as well (140 different plant types were gathered).

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