Ancient Farmers Replaced Hunter-Gatherer Forerunners

[ramonmercado]

Taking a holistic view about the domestication of crops and animals.

Archaeologist Xinyi Liu at Washington University in St. Louis teamed up with Martin Jones of the University of Cambridge to write a new paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that explains how recent research is connecting the science of biological domestication to early food globalization.

Liu, an associate professor of archaeology and associate chair of the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences, proposes a new conceptual framework to understand domestication, which is relevant not only to anthropology but other fields such as biology and ecology.

In this Q&A, he also offers his perspective on how understanding the past conditions can help us to forge a vision for the future.

The domestication of plants and animals is among the most significant transitions in human history. How has our understanding of domestication changed recently?​

Our new article focuses on how we conceptualize domestication. A considerable intellectual legacy has depicted domestication as a series of short-lived, localized and episodic events. Some of the literature, particularly those pieces dating back to the early 20th century, envisioned the process as a transition from humans within nature to humans controlling nature in a revolutionary fashion.

The metaphor there is "revolution." So, as people described it, there was a "Neolithic Revolution" that functioned in a similar way as the "Industrial Revolution" or the "scientific revolution"—a rapid technological shift followed by changes in societies, according to some narratives.

It is time to reconsider all this. Newly emergent evidence from the last 15 years challenges the idea of rapid domestication. This evidence shows unambiguously that plant and animal domestication in a range of species entailed a more gradual transition spanning a few thousand years across extensive geographies. ...

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-qa-archaeologist-fieldwork-movement-crops.html

 

[ramonmercado]

Neolithic farming in Western Europe - the early days.

About 7,000 years ago, the first farmers in the western Mediterranean selected the most fertile land available, cultivated cereal varieties very similar to today's, and made sparing use of domestic animal feces, as they do today. These are some of the elements that characterize the expansion of agriculture during the Neolithic period in Western Europe, according to an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The first author is Professor Josep Lluís Araus, from the Faculty of Biology at the University of Barcelona and member of Agrotechnio, the CERCA Center for Research in Agrotechnology.

The study reconstructs the environmental conditions, crop management practices and the characteristics of the plants that existed when agriculture appeared in Western Europe, and takes as a reference the site of La Draga (Banyoles, Girona), one of the most significant and complex sites on the Iberian Peninsula, as well as including data on sixteen other sites from the beginnings of agriculture in the region.

According to the conclusions, at the time of its appearance on the Iberian Peninsula, agriculture had already achieved a consolidated level in agricultural techniques for growing cereals, suggesting an evolution throughout its migration across Europe of the methods and genetic material originating from the fertile crescent, the cradle of the Neolithic revolution in the Middle East.

Experts from the University of Lleida (UdL) and the joint research unit CTFC-Agrotecnio, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the Universitat de València, the University of Basel (Switzerland), the Agri-Food Research and Technology Center of Aragon (CITA) and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) also participate in the article.

The excavations in La Draga are coordinated by the Archaeological Museum of Banyoles, within the framework of the four-yearly archaeological excavation projects of the Department of Culture of the Government of Catalonia.

Since its appearance nearly 12,000 years ago in the territories of the so-called fertile crescent, agriculture has transformed the relationship with the natural environment and the socio-economic structure of human populations. Now, the team has applied paleoenvironmental and archaeobotanical reconstruction techniques to identify the conditions in the village of La Draga when agriculture emerged. ...

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-environmental-conditions-cultivation-agriculture-emerged.html