Agriculture arose in many parts of the Fertile Crescent at once

L A Times ^ | July 5, 2013, 6:53 p.m. | Melissa Pandika

[BenLurkin]

For decades, archaeologists believed agriculture took root in a part of the Fertile Crescent called the Levant, which includes present-day Israel, Lebanon and Jordan, as well as parts of Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other countries. From there, it was thought to have spread eastward to present-day Iran.

“The eastern Fertile Crescent has been treated as backwater,” said Melinda Zeder, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Institute’s Program in Human Ecology and Archaeobiology, who was not involved in the study. Now, the understanding that people in the Zagros grew and ground cereal grains as early as their counterparts in the Levant has “democratized this situation where everyone in the region was involved,” she said.

Excavations in the western Fertile Crescent yielded evidence of plant and animal domestication dating to about 11,500 years ago, while digs in the eastern Fertile Crescent found evidence of domestication dating to only about 9,500 years ago. However, after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Western archaeologists were unable to analyze sites in the east with the same modern recovery and dating techniques used to study those to the west.

Improved diplomatic relations between Iran and the West enabled archaeologists from the University of Tuebingen in Germany to visit the 12,000-year-old site of Chogha Golan in 2009 and 2010, which they excavated with their counterparts from the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research. They were eager to do so, since recent genetic analysis of modern-day barley and animals such as sheep, pigs and goats in the eastern Fertile Crescent suggested that domestication could have begun earlier than 9,500 years ago

[BenLurkin]

antediluvian ping

[Sacajaweau]

or...it started ............and went thatta way..

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BenLurkin. Apparently Iran's mullahcracy is in public relations mode right now. Also, in one article about this the simultaneity is actually thousands of years from end to end; additionally, the uncorrected (iow, too low) RC date for one multirow (domesticated and irrigated) barley sample was 14,000 years, about two thousand years before the oldest date here. :')

Still, I'm sure these scientists are -- you guessed it -- outstanding in their field.

[bigheadfred]

Iran's mullahcracy is in public relations mode

I kinda got stuck right here cause you know it goes against the grain.

[SunkenCiv]

I couldn’t wheat to say it.

[MHGinTN]

Apparently, the people who built Gobekli Tepi (in a region of what is now Turkey) were farming a wild grain that was perhaps the earliest wheat plant. Perhaps, when that culture expired, for whatever reason, and the survivors migrated eastward they took the grain knowledge with them into the fertile crescent. Just sayin ...

[fella]

Someone had a good idea about planting and growing food and other hunter-gatherers passing through copied it. In a few short years the idea spread. Looking back to us it would appear to happen all over at ounce.

[Roccus]

(aliens)

[Einherjar]

but Hops.............who grew the Hops ?

[MHGinTN]

The earliest beers did not have hops. Even by the 4th millennium BC in Egypt, beer was made without hops, IIRC.

[BenLurkin]

Iran's mullahcracy is in public relations mode right now

Bingo!

[Texan5]

“Someone had a good idea”-I’m pretty sure that is exactly right, too.

Curious creatures that we are, I’m sure humans started trading any and everything from tools and eligible mates to all sorts of planting, and animal domestication methods the first time they met and shared a fire and a meal. Sort of a stone age working lunch...