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Down on the Farm: Early Plant Cultivation
There’s a character named Alu in “Wind,” my Ice Age novel set in the Fertile Crescent, who has the idea to intentionally plant the seeds from wild emmer wheat, until then an unreliable food source to the hunter-gatherers who occupied that historically amazing area of the world. Alu, it turns out, or people much like her who lived in that harsh time, “were far more clever and more skilled than we knew.”[1]
At least 23,000 years ago, the people who occupied an ancient site called Ohalo II, cultivated crops on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. They built brush huts and hearths, created stone tools to implement early agriculture, and left behind the remains of 140 species of plants which “included 13 known weeds mixed with edible cereals, such as wild emmer, wild barley, and wild oats.”[2] A stone grinding slab was uncovered, suggesting that the cereal grains were processed to make them easier to eat and digest. “The large number of cereals showing specific kinds of scars on their seeds indicate the likelihood of those cereals growing in fields, and the presence of sickle blades indicates that these humans deliberately planned the harvest of cereal.”[3]
“The community at Ohalo II was already exploiting the precursors to domesticated plant types that would become a staple in early agriculture, including emmer wheat, barley, pea, lentil, almond, fig, grape and olive.”[4]
The next time you have your Wheaties, thank those clever people who slowly, but surely, planted, weeded, plucked, and harrowed the ground not only for themselves but for all of us who came after.
[1] Ainit Snir, Dani Nadel, Iris Groman-Yaroslavski, Yoel Melamed, Marcelo Sternberg, Ofer Bar-Yosef, Ehud Weiss. The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long Before Neolithic Farming. PLOS ONE, 2015; 10 (7): e0131422 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0131422
American Friends of Tel Aviv University. "First evidence of farming in Mideast 23,000 years ago: Evidence of earliest small-scale agricultural cultivation." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 22 July 2015. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150722144709.htm>.
[2] American Friends of Tel Aviv University
[3] American Friends of Tel Aviv University
[4] Peter Beaumont, The Guardian, July 2015
Dispatch from shanidar
Real Men Have Brow Ridges
Ralph Solecki, the paleoanthropologist who proclaimed the humanity of Neanderthals found buried in a cave in the Shanidar Valley of Iraq, recently died at the age of 101. His book, Shanidar, The First Flower People, details the discoveries he made there from 1951 through 1960. Uncovered in the cave were eight adult and two infant skeletons killed by earthquake induced rockfalls.
The Neanderthal baby rested twenty-six feet below the floor of Shanidar cave. Stone artifacts in place nearby the tiny skeleton indicated that the still occupied cave had been used from the “very first.” .Looking at the photograph taken by Dr. Solecki after the protective cast used for transporting the 40,000-year-old skull was removed, no one can “deny the commonality of the man who lived, and thought, and felt, and watched, and listened, created, and reacted within that undeniably human skull.”
The book is quite readable, and for contemporary readers, the Kurds, who provided the backbreaking labor of dislodging, digging and carrying massive amounts of rock and compacted dirt, emerge in an interesting historical framework for the current state in that most ancient part of the world.
The photo shows how the skull of Shanidar I looked in the ground. “A Neanderthal if I ever saw one,”
said Dr. Solecki in his notes made on the day of discovery.
About the Author of Wind
Pat Kranish loves living in the past and sets much of her fiction in the Ice Age—even though she hates being cold and left New York to live in Las Vegas. New Life, The Bear, and The Time Before Memory, stories excerpted from Wind—A Novel of the Ice Age, have been published and enjoyed (maybe wept over too) by readers who share her appetit
Pat Kranish loves living in the past and sets much of her fiction in the Ice Age—even though she hates being cold and left New York to live in Las Vegas. New Life, The Bear, and The Time Before Memory, stories excerpted from Wind—A Novel of the Ice Age, have been published and enjoyed (maybe wept over too) by readers who share her appetite to go back in time and explore the lives of the ancient people who lived in the mountains that ring the Mediterranean Sea. More stories, from the time when the last of the big toothed cats, and beavers as big as cave bears roamed the wet and cold landscape of Nevada will appear here soon.
wind A Novel of the ice age
Book Available Now on Amazon
25,000 years ago small migrating bands of hunters and foragers traced converging paths across the freezing earth. Evidence of their existence is etched in their long buried bones, turned to stone as hard as the tools they shaped over the millennia. They followed the vast herds that flourished as the earth cooled and the seas lowered, adapting to hard life in arctic and desert, forest and savannah.
ICE AGE PARK, TULE SPRINGS, LAS VEGAS, NV
Clean up Crew January 20, 2020
Video coming soon. Lions and camels! Oh my!
Repository Tour Set for August 1st
The Las Vegas Natural History Museum will be conducting a private tour for on Saturday, August 1, 2020. Join this special members only event to see some of the amazing fossil finds from the monument -- like those pictured here.
This tour will be strictly limited to 10 participants to adhere to social distancing recommendations. Two tours are available at 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. Please email jilld@protectorsoftulesprings.orgto reserve your spot!
PS - Stay tuned for plans to tour the
Nevada State Museum repository in the fall!