LeBrok
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According to this new study it happened much earlier than we expected, around 23 thousand years ago!!! This paper claim that primitive, yet ture farming practices and seed selection, were established 11 thousand years before Neolithic "revolution".
Yet again science points to the fact, that farming is not just a brilliant idea, which everybody can pick up and change his/her life, but slow evolutionary adaptation to new food source and farming skills. It took at least 11 k years for evolution to select and enhance farming genes, the farming predispositions.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422
Yet again science points to the fact, that farming is not just a brilliant idea, which everybody can pick up and change his/her life, but slow evolutionary adaptation to new food source and farming skills. It took at least 11 k years for evolution to select and enhance farming genes, the farming predispositions.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422
[h=2]Abstract[/h]Weeds are currently present in a wide range of ecosystems worldwide. Although the beginning of their evolution is largely unknown, researchers assumed that they developed in tandem with cultivation since the appearance of agricultural habitats some 12,000 years ago. These rapidly-evolving plants invaded the human disturbed areas and thrived in the new habitat. Here we present unprecedented new findings of the presence of “proto-weeds” and small-scale trial cultivation in Ohalo II, a 23,000-year-old hunter-gatherers' sedentary camp on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Israel. We examined the plant remains retrieved from the site (ca. 150,000 specimens), placing particular emphasis on the search for evidence of plant cultivation by Ohalo II people and the presence of weed species. The archaeobotanically-rich plant assemblage demonstrates extensive human gathering of over 140 plant species and food preparation by grinding wild wheat and barley. Among these, we identified 13 well-known current weeds mixed with numerous seeds of wild emmer, barley, and oat. This collection provides the earliest evidence of a human-disturbed environment—at least 11 millennia before the onset of agriculture—that provided the conditions for the development of "proto-weeds", a prerequisite for weed evolution. Finally, we suggest that their presence indicates the earliest, small-scale attempt to cultivate wild cereals seen in the archaeological record.