Ancient Agriculture

[Beagle]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 020907.php

Three University of Calgary researchers, together with international colleagues, have traced the earliest known evidence for the domestication and spread of chili peppers by analysing starch microfossils recovered from grinding stones, sediments and charred ceramic cookware. In a forthcoming article in the journal Science, they report that common varieties of chili peppers (Capsicum species) were widely used in a region extending from the Bahamas to southern Peru.

"Until quite recently it's been assumed that the ancestors of the great highland civilizations, like the Inca and the Aztecs, were responsible for most of the cultural and agricultural advances of the region," says Dr. Scott Raymond, U of C archaeologist and one of the authors of the paper. "We now have evidence that the indigenous people from tropical, lowland areas deserve credit for the domestication of the chili pepper."

I'm not one of those people who like hot, spicey food. But many people do and have for a long time. The origin of chili peppers probably pre-dates the the findings in this article.

[stan]

I don't know why anyone would have assumed that the Inca and Aztecs were responsible for the rise of agriculture in the Americas, since they were the most modern of the indigenous cultures...whereas we know now there there were cities/civiliaztions a couple of millennia before those two.

[Beagle]

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/co ... 2007/213/2

A new study suggests that barley may have undergone domestication twice, a finding with important implications for understanding the spread of farming.
Archaeologists have long debated whether the so-called founder crops of the agricultural revolution--including wheat and barley--were domesticated once or multiple times. The record is ambiguous. Over the past decades, they have unearthed the earliest remains of domesticated barley at sites in the Fertile Crescent that date back 10,500 years. But there is also evidence for barley cultivation about 9000 years ago at sites further east in Central Asia. Today, the wild progenitors of domesticated wheat and other founder crops grow only in the Fertile Crescent, but wild barley is found in the western and eastern regions. As a result, archaeologists haven't been sure whether the cultivated barley in the east came from the Fertile Crescent or was domesticated directly from local wild plants.

I'm not sure that I would leave the ancient Sahara out of that mix though.

[Beagle]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 040907.php

TALLAHASSEE, Fla.--A Florida State University anthropologist has new evidence that ancient farmers in Mexico were cultivating an early form of maize, the forerunner of modern corn, about 7,300 years ago - 1,200 years earlier than scholars previously thought.

Professor Mary Pohl conducted an analysis of sediments in the Gulf Coast of Tabasco, Mexico, and concluded that people were planting crops in the "New World" of the Americas around 5,300 B.C. The analysis extends Pohl's previous work in this area and validates principles of microfossil data collection.

I'll bet this new date will eventually be moved back again. From Archeologica News.

[Beagle]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 062507.php

The plants we found in northern Peru did not typically grow in the wild in that area,” Dillehay said. “We believe they must have therefore been domesticated elsewhere first and then brought to this valley by traders or mobile horticulturists.

“The use of these domesticated plants goes along with broader cultural changes we believe existed at that time in this area, such as people staying in one place, developing irrigation and other water management techniques, creating public ceremonials, building mounds and obtaining and saving exotic artifacts.”

I wonder where they originally came from. This article is about 9,000 yr. old agriculture in the Andes.

[Digit]

Didn't Heyerdahl have something to say about this 50 yrs ago?

[Beagle]

I think he did have a lot to say about the spread of agriculture in Polynesia but he wasn't talking about anything this old. It's been a long time since I read his stuff though.

[Minimalist]

I wonder where they originally came from. This article is about 9,000 yr. old agriculture in the Andes.

Oh! The Club ain't gonna like that!

[Digit]

Long time for me as well Beag, but didn't he suggest that cotton in SA was a triploid and that had only been found in the middle east and Asia? Remember the Corn carvings in India? Trade, how ever old, goes both ways of course.

[Charlie Hatchett]

Looks like I accidently duplicated your post, Beags.
I'll let that thread die and move the posts over here.

[Charlie Hatchett]

The researchers dated the squash from approximately 9,200 years ago, the peanut from 7,600 years ago and the cotton from 5,500 years ago.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 062507.php

Can one of you guys recall when farming is thought to have begun during the European Neolithic. Does this find predate the earliest evidence in Europe? It appears the dating above is uncalibrated.

Note Tom Dillehay is the primary researcher for Monte Verde.

Here's a bit from Wiki:

Ancient origins
Developed independently by geographically distant populations, systematic agriculture first appeared in Southwest Asia in the Fertile Crescent, particularly in modern-day southern Iraq and Syria. Around 9500 BC, proto-farmers began to select and cultivate food plants with desired characteristics. Though there is evidence of earlier sporadic use of wild cereals, it was not until after 9500 BC that the eight so-called founder crops of agriculture appear: first emmer and einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax.

[Charlie Hatchett]

I thought they had been reluctantly pushing back the date for early agriculture....even the Club will react to evidence eventually.

Yeah, I have no idea. I've been so wrapped up in this Early Paleo stuff that I'm pretty clueless when it comes to Late Paleo-Archaic, or the European equivalent, Neolithic technology.

[Minimalist]

This is what I was remembering.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... lture.html

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.

[Charlie Hatchett]

This is what I was remembering.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... lture.html

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.

So it appears the Fertile Crescent still has the title by a couple of thousand years.

[Minimalist]

Hancock reported that Wendorf and Schild found evidence of stone farming implements in the 11th millenia BC or so in the Nile Valley.



http://www.antiquityofman.com/EgyptianPredynastic.html

Evidence of grinding stones at Late Paleolithic sites in Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia dating to the end of the Pleistocene (see Wendorf and Schild 1976, 1989: 792-793; Wendorf, Said, and Schild 1970) may be related to early experiments that might have led to farming.

WTH knows.