A Guide to Stone Circles (New Edition), Aubrey Burl
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Prehistoric people took 1000 years to tame wild plants
Submitted by Andy B on Tuesday, 13 April 2004 Page Views: 1177
External Links: Remnants of ancient barley, wheat, figs and pistachios nearly 10,000 years old are helping to solve the mystery of how and when nomadic hunter-gatherers became sedentary farmers.
A team led by Australian archaeologist Dr Phillip Edwards of Melbourne's La Trobe University said its findings in the Middle East suggested humans went through a 1000-year phase of cultivating wild plants before they began breeding plants in earnest.
The team has been investigating remnants at a site near the Dead Sea in Jordan that represents what archaeologists call the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) period, when humans began to establish settlements.
Until relatively recently, the PPNA was also generally accepted as the time when humans began to domesticate plants.
But Edwards said the major flaw in this argument was that any archaeological evidence of plants from PPNA sites were not conclusive evidence of domesticated varieties.
"That left us with a puzzle," said Edwards. "Villages really intensified and grew in this period, and if it wasn't due to a new food base then everybody was left with the question of what caused it."
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