Let the games begin...
Posted on 02/20/2004 12:04:12 PM PST by blam
Prehistoric row erupts over hunter-gatherer riddle
February 19, 2004 - 12:22PM
A team of Australian archaeologists have sparked an academic row by claiming to have solved the riddle of a missing 1,000 years in human prehistory.
The scientists from Melbourne's La Trobe University have found remnants of grains on the shore of the Dead Sea in Jordan that they believe help fill the 1,000-year gap in our knowledge of man's transition from nomad to farmer.
But not everyone agrees, and the Australian team is now muscling up for an academic arm wrestle next month with the exponents of different theories in France.
The debate is all about the period when man shifted from being a nomadic hunter-gatherer to settling down as a sedentary farmer.
Conventional wisdom is that the transitional period, known as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) period, finished about 9,200 BC.
But La Trobe's Archaeology Program Coordinator Dr Phillip Edwards says the university's discovery of wild ancestors to domestic crops in Jordan now proves the PPNA in fact lasted until 8,300 BC.
This period saw "pre-domestication cultivation" of barley, wheat, pulses and pistachio nuts.
"The theory holds that our forebears certainly began planting crops from about 9250 BC, but the grains they planted for around 1,000 years continued to be wild varieties, leading to the mistaken conclusion that they had been gathered in the wild during those 1,000 years and not cultivated," he said.
This view remains a minority one, with most archaeologists still accepting that man had not begun farming cultivated crops at this time, so the stage is set for a good old academic stoush.
The arena for the bloodletting will be the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Workshop at Frejus, France next month.
Members of the La Trobe team will feature in a documentary on the origins of farming life, Stories from the Stone Age, which will screen on the ABC later in the year.
- AAP
I hope someone looks into liquid storage container development. Ya have to store all that beer somewhere. Man grows grain...man makes beer. Man needs big vessels to store beer. Ergo pottery evolves in storage devices.
Beer...its a History Thing.
Let the games begin...
This view remains a minority one, with most archaeologists still accepting that man had not begun farming cultivated crops at this time, so the stage is set for a good old academic stoush.
Are some suggesting that we went straight from gathering in the wild to cultivating genetically engineered crops? Doesn't it seem logical that we would have begun cultivating the wild crops that were available, and later learned to graft and otherwise engineer the crops? Unless.... Space aliens popped in and gave us more modern crops. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Atouk
Yup, I'd look around the Black Sea when it was still a fresh water lake. It'd be 550 ft underwater now.
Rainforest Researchers Hit Paydirt (Farming 11k Years Ago In South America)
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"Recent use of dendrochronology for calibration of radiocarbon-derived dates suggests that they deviate increasingly from actual calendar dates, from an error of about 200 years at 1000 B.C. up to an error of about 900 years at 5,000 radiocarbon years B.C. . .Although calibration curves are designed to bring radiocarbon dates in line with actual dates, the limits of these curves currently do not extend earlier than about 5200 B.C."
A. Bernard Knapp, The History and Culture of Ancient Western Asia and Egypt, Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1988, 7
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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