9,200-year-old find challenges theories about the origins of agriculture

Excavations at Toda Cave have revealed evidence of harvesting wild barley using a sickle as early as the Neolithic period, hundreds of kilometers east of the Fertile Crescent.

An excavation conducted in Uzbekistan indicates that the roots of agriculture spread far beyond the Fertile Crescent.

The rise of agriculture in the Neolithic period marked a turning point in the development of human culture. Scholars now agree that agricultural practices emerged independently in several regions—including Africa, the Americas, and East Asia—but it was generally accepted that the origin of staple crops, such as wheat, barley, and legumes, was in the Fertile Crescent. In this region, the Netupan culture began to gather wild grains about 10,000 years ago.

Agriculture in ancient Uzbekistan

A new interdisciplinary study shows that as early as 9,200 years ago, communities living to the south and east—in what is now Uzbekistan—were harvesting wild barley with sickle blades. This finding suggests that cultural behaviors that led to agriculture were much more widespread than previously thought, and challenges the assumption that agriculture arose solely in response to climate pressures or population growth.

The discovery comes from the Toda Cave, located in the Surkhandarya Valley in southern Uzbekistan. The excavations were conducted by an international team led by Xinyi Zhou from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Anthropology in Beijing, and supervised by Farkhod Maksudov, director of the Institute of Archaeology in Samarkand. Stone tools, charcoal and plant remains were collected from the oldest layers in the cave.

Botanical and archaeological finds

The archaeobotanical analysis, conducted by Robert Spangler of the Max Planck Institute, showed that the local inhabitants gathered wild barley from the nearby valleys. In addition, pistachio shells and apple seeds were found. Examination of the stone tools – mainly blades and flints – revealed wear marks characteristic of harvesting grasses and other plants, paralleling evidence from sites identified with early agricultural activity.

Rethinking the transition to agriculture

“This discovery should change the way scientists think about the transition from foraging to agriculture, because it shows how widespread these transitional behaviors were,” said Xinyin Zhou.

According to Spengler: “Early hunter-gatherers were already engaged in cultural practices that later led to the emergence of agriculture. Increasingly, research suggests that domestication occurred without conscious human intent, and the finding that people repeatedly evolved behaviors that led to agriculture reinforces this view.”

The research team plans to continue to investigate how widespread these behaviors were in Central Asia during this period. They will also examine whether the barley grains found represent the first evidence of attempted domestication using wild barley in morphological structure. If cultivation was attempted, it may represent a separate source of agriculture, or alternatively, the spread of the tradition from the Fertile Crescent eastward much earlier than previously estimated.

Either way, future research is expected to fill important gaps in understanding the human story.

for the scientific article

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• Agriculture began simultaneously in several places in the Fertile Crescent
• A lot of genetic similarity between the Jews and the Kurds
• The crescent is no longer fruitful
• Barley domestication began in Israel in the Galilee region
• A look through the microscope revealed: the flint blades are actually the oldest sickle blades in the world