By using walls to channelize and collect floodwaters, ancient farmers made the most of scant rainfall to grow crops in the desert. These techniques are still used today, like in this vineyard near Sede Boqer, Israel.
Posted on 04/06/2014 8:00:14 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
For thousands of years, different groups of people have lived in the Negev desert, building stone walls and cities that survive to this day. But how did they make their living?
The current thinking is that these desert denizens didn't practice agriculture before approximately the first century, surviving instead by raising animals, said Hendrik Bruins, a landscape archaeologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
But new research suggests people in this area, the Negev highlands, practiced agriculture as long ago as 5000 B.C., Bruins told LiveScience. If true, the finding could change historians' views of the area's inhabitants, who lived in the region in biblical times and even before, he added.
A great surprise
Bruins' findings come from radiocarbon dating of bones and organic materials in various soil layers in an ancient field in southern Israel. He measured the ratio of carbon isotopes (atoms of the same element with a different number of neutrons), which changes as the radioactive carbon-14 isotope breaks down over time, while the stable carbon-12 does not. Within the soil, he found evidence of past cultivation, including animal manure and charred organic material (likely burnt kitchen scraps), both of which have been used as fertilizer around the world for millennia, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
By using walls to channelize and collect floodwaters, ancient farmers made the most of scant rainfall to grow crops in the desert. These techniques are still used today, like in this vineyard near Sede Boqer, Israel.
What a joke....5000 years??? Kinda tells me you’ve been guessing all along. Now...about all that carbon dating....
There have been many advanced human civilizations. I think it is a mistake to assume we went in a single grade of development.
bttt
I can’t help it there is nothing wrong with the headline, but in my head I clearly hear the 60’s TV Robin saying “Holy Land Farming, Batman! Twisted I am.
Heh, heh. Is it now?
Your post tells me you don’t know what you’re talking about.
I’ll believe it when they find some 7,000 year old overalls.
7000 years ago, IOW, the migration after the Black Sea flood.
Well. Now we have a better idea when thought began.
7000 years ago, IOW, the migration after the Black Sea flood.
something tells me if i ever have a chance at Grace...
Save the carbon for making footprints.
Oily hand prints on the front, or the deal is off. :)
Not overalls but if they find some petrified Matzoh,it’s all over for the Palestinian claims that they were there first.
wouldn’t be surprised to find a “Moses was here” doodle on some clay tablet.
Now wouldn’t that be a kosher hoot?
well, there kinda is a ‘Moses was here’ already isn’t there? Caleb’s puported tomb is in Timnath-serah (west bank) and it was this same Caleb, from Numbers 13:23, who went out as a spy for Moses, camped south of Israel, and found grapevines, with grapes so large it took two men to carry one bunch stretched between two staffs.
Grapes do grow wild, but to get a cluster so fruity that two men were needed to carry it? It’s hard to imagine something like that to not have been a result of careful cultivation by the ‘giants’ that Caleb and the other 11 spys saw.
not the same area as the article is talking about but Cain was also a farmer, Noah was a vitner, so horticultural skills were known from the beginning of the Bible.
[ something tells me if i ever have a chance at Grace... ]
You are 3,000 years too late :)
[ There have been many advanced human civilizations. I think it is a mistake to assume we went in a single grade of development. ]
There is all sorts of weird stuff in the era of antiquity...
Does not surprise me. Here is what troubles me. Modern man punctuated into existence 70,000 to 240,000 ears ago depending upon whom you believe. 5000 years ago Man was still a stone age technologist. In that short amount of time he landed on the Moon. Yet, it took him 35 to 120 times longer to go from making spearheads to stone buildings without adding anything new to his anatomy.
This would only make sense if world human population remained too low for society to support clever inventive types. I think there is a lot of interesting stuff buried deeper than archeologists tend to dig that will eventually crop up and push advanced technology further back in time.
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