[Sca-cooks] FW: Farm Report

[kingstaste at mindspring.com]

Christianna:

	I thought the foregoing from the BBC might be of interest:

> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3826731.stm

Cathal.



Farming origins gain 10,000 years


Wild types of emmer wheat like those found at Ohalo were forerunners of
today's
varieties
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
obtaining them than the return from the foods themselves.

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.










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