The Ohlu site provides data on human nutrition 23 thousand years ago. Until now it was common to find the roots of agriculture 13 thousand years ago
Avi Blizovsky
Wild wheat like this was found at a tent site near the Sea of Galilee
Direct link to this page: https://www.hayadan.org.il/earlyfarmingohalo.html
The scientist was the first to report this on 28/6/2004
For some reason, about a month and a half later, the news also reached the daily press. In the following news from Haaretz
Research at the Oholo site on the Sea of Galilee: the origin of agriculture is 10,000 years old
Avi Blizovsky, 28/6/2004
Wild types of the wheat mother like those found in his tent were the forerunners of the initial steps of the slides 23 thousand years ago, much earlier than previously thought. That's what experts say.
Grass species including wild types of wheat and barley, which were the ancestors of the variety of grains grown today.
An Israeli-American team reported the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The evidence comes from a collection of 90 prehistoric plant remains that were excavated in his tent in the north of the country. The Uholo site dates back to prehistoric times and remained undisturbed until the recent excavations by Ehud Weiss of Harvard University and his colleagues.
The low-oxygen environment has well preserved the remains of plants that were left there during the Stone Age. The archaeologists also found the remains of a hut, a bonfire, a human grave and stone tools at the site.
Most of the evidence indicates that the Near East was the cradle of agriculture. Indeed, all the basic food plants eaten by humans in their tent appear to be grasses, including the grains including wheat and barley.
The grass remains in his tent include a large amount of grass with small grains. These small grains disappeared from the human diet about 13 thousand years ago.
Anthropologists believe that agriculture began when small hunter-gatherer groups in Southwest Asia were under pressure from the explosion of the human population and the small size of the hunting grounds. This required them to rely less on hunting large animals such as deer, donkeys, and wild cattle, and expand their food basket to include small mammals, birds, fish, and small seeds. This turned out to be the first essential step towards agriculture.
The low-value food is so called because it required more labor to obtain than its added caloric value.
The studies done in the tent also show that the diet of humans was more extensive during the Stone Age than was commonly thought until now. "We can say that such a selection of nutrition has not been seen since the Levant, the researchers wrote in their article.
23 thousand year old wheat was found near the Sea of Galilee
Monday, August 2, 2004, 12:38 by: Ran Shapira, Haaretz
The transition to a plant-based diet occurred with the agricultural revolution (archive photo) On the shores of the Sea of Galilee, the earliest evidence of the use of a large variety of plants for human nutrition was found: grains of wild wheat, barley and small-grain cereals
On the floor of one of the sukkots at the Ahalo II site (Shev Kinneret), a hunter-gatherer-fisher camp from 23 years ago, around a large stone supported by several pebbles, grains of wild wheat, barley, and several types of small-grain cereals were found. Dr. Ehud Weiss, Dr. Vilma Wettersum and Prof. Ofer Bar Yosef from Harvard University, and Dr. Dani Nadel from the University of Haifa, who is managing the excavations at the site, believe that this stone was used as a grindstone. According to them, the presence of plant remains on the site provides evidence that the first steps towards the agricultural revolution were made about 10,000 years earlier than what was believed until now.
According to the accepted theory, the first step towards the domestication of grains such as wild wheat and barley, which was a central part of the transition to the beginning of agriculture, took place in the Fertile Crescent area about 13 thousand years ago. Many studies dealing with the beginning of agriculture are based on the hypothesis known as the "Broad Spectrum Revolution", which was put forward by the American archaeologist Kent Flannery in 1969. Flannery hypothesized that the depletion of environmental resources forced the hunter-gatherer groups that lived in the area about 13 years ago to increase the variety of their foods. The hunter-gatherers began to use food species that had previously been ignored. Various wild grains, which before were not part of the human food basket, became a potential food. The collection of wild grains, especially wild wheat and barley, led to their domestication and the beginning of agriculture.
Flannery hypothesized that a similar process also led to the domestication of animals such as goats, sheep and cows. But while various studies have provided evidence that hunter-gatherers expanded the variety of animal foods they consumed as early as 50 years ago, evidence that plant foods were part of that economic revolution was lacking. The reason for this is that until the excavation of Bahlo II, plant remains were not found in such large quantities in excavations at prehistoric sites, because weathering processes usually lead to the finding of small amounts of botanical finds from ancient times.
In the Ahalo II camp, which was discovered in the 23s on the southwest coast of the Sea of Galilee, the remains of the oldest Sukkots in the world so far were found. According to Dr. Weiss and his colleagues, the camp knew several cycles of settlement and abandonment XNUMX thousand years ago, until it was completely abandoned. Shortly after the last abandonment, the water level in the Sea of Galilee rose and since then the camp was covered in water. The lake water and the clay they deposited sealed the site, preventing its exposure to oxygen and helping to preserve it.
The good preservation conditions allowed the researchers to find at the Ahalo II site a collection of rare quality and quantity of plant remains and seeds, from which a sample of about 90 thousand was studied. In an article they recently published in the "Academy of Sciences Proceedings of the National" journal, they write that a significant portion of the plants were small-grained cereals such as short-eared brome, common foxtail, capillary barley, bulging barley, and convoluta. The grain dimensions of these grains are significantly smaller than those of wheat and barley. Its volume in most of them does not exceed five cubic millimeters (the volume of wheat grains is about 48 cubic millimeters and barley grains reach a volume of about 42 cubic millimeters). In addition, the height of small grains is about half the height of wheat and barley plants. These differences mean that to gather the same amount of food you have to work longer, bend and kneel.
In ethnographic studies on societies that included small-grained grains as part of their menu, it was found that such seeds were eaten in a variety of ways: chewing the grains as they are, roasting or searing in the heat of the fire, cooking (by inserting a hot stone into a leather, stone, or wooden vessel in which grains and water are placed), soaking in water to soften without Cooking, grinding, crushing or crushing with stones. At this point, the researchers do not have unequivocal proof of how the residents of the Ahalo II site consumed the grains. Despite this, they believe that these plants were part of the diet of the inhabitants of the site.
From an analysis of botanical finds from a selection of prehistoric sites in the Middle East, Siko Wis, Wetterström, Nadel and Bar Yossef that the small grain grains disappeared from the human diet about 13 thousand years ago. So, with the agricultural revolution, the transition to a diet based on cultured plants took place.
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