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farming invented many times by many different farmers over a vast landscape. @ carlzimmer . @nytimes. 




<u+201c><u+2026>in the 1990s, archaeologists largely concluded that farming in the fertile crescent began in jordan and israel, a region known as the southern levant. <u+201c>the model was that everything started there, and then everything spread out from there, including maybe the people,<u+201d> said melinda a. zeder, a senior research scientist at the smithsonian national museum of natural history. 




but in recent years, dr. zeder and other archaeologists have overturned that consensus. their research suggests that people were inventing farming at several sites in the fertile crescent at roughly the same time. in the zagros mountains of iran, for example, dr. zeder and her colleagues have found evidence of the gradual domestication of wild goats over many centuries around 10,000 years ago. 




people may have been cultivating plants earlier than believed, too. 




in the 1980s, dani nadel, then at hebrew university, and his colleagues excavated a 23,000-year-old site on the shores of the sea of galilee known as ohalo ii. it consisted of half a dozen brush huts. last year, dr. nadel co-authored a study showing that one of the huts contained 150,000 charred seeds and fruits, including many types, such as almonds, grapes and olives, that would later become crops. . a stone blade found at ohalo ii seemed to have been used as a sickle to harvest cereals. a stone slab was used to grind the seeds. it seems clear the inhabitants were cultivating wild plants long before farming was thought to have begun. 




<u+201c>we got fixated on the very few things we just happened to see preserved in the archaeological record, and we got this false impression that this was an abrupt change,<u+201d> dr. zeder said. <u+201c>now we really understand there was this long period where they<u+2019>re playing around with resources.<u+201d> 




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farming invented many times by many different farmers over a vast landscape. @carlzimmer. @nytimes. - russia news now
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