Archeologists have uncovered surprisingly sophisticated grain storage that PREDATES plant domesticat

An excavation site near the Dead Sea in Jordan has revealed an 11,000-year-old granary, which even had elevated floors to prevent rodent pilfering and to increase air circulation.

The stone and mud building was capped with a wattle roof (branches or reeds woven around poles) was about 9.8 feet (3 meters) in diameter. The findings, reported earlier this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal wild barley as one of the ancient building's contents. Two nearby structures also appear to have been used for food and grain processing.

www.scientificamerican.com...

This is huge and appears to squish the modern theory that agriculture began a meer 10,000 years ago.

Agriculture was developed at least 10,000 years ago..

en.wikipedia.org...

How can you have a culture with granaries before agriculture was developed?
Our ancestors were alot smarter than we give them credit for.

Yet more evidence that our history is not as we are lead to believe...



[edit on 24-6-2009 by warrenb]

reply to post by warrenb



S&F

This is huge. I believe that the history of mankind is too simple there are so many irregularities in the "story" that I think that the PTB know a lot more than they want us to know. It's for stories like this that I first started reading ATS.

big, but not huge. it's not like they found a 52' plasma in there. now THAT would be huge.

2nd line.

reply to post by exile1981


Of course they know alot more then they say but sadly we will never get the truth from them as this would mean they have to admit lying to the population for all this time. They will just find a way to disprove this fact or the make it a dating error and continue as nothing ever happened .

[edit on 24-6-2009 by Thill]

That's an interesting discovery. It doesn't challenge the essence of accepted dates though. It refers to the earliest evidence of grain storage, domesticated plants came later.

Early cultures had the knowledge to sow the seeds of wild grasses like wheat. The excess grain that they didn't use was stored in the granary they've discovered. Domesticating plants is the process whereby early man favored seeds that grew with greater yields or hardiness. Crops that failed would be avoided but the ones that succeeded would be used to sow the next crop. This form of 'artificial selection' would eventually lead to a 'domesticated' plant that was both hardy and higher yielding. It's also the general point in time when we crossed over to agriculture and settlements...a transition from hunter-gatherers.

The date of this type of wild seed sowing is thought to be at least 14kya. I imagine the climate of Jordan way back then was similar to now...dry. Ideal conditions to store grain without the more northern problems of rot and damp.

In a political sense, these early granaries and the settlements they represent are a symbol of property. When we settled and 'owned' stuff, exchange values were reinforced and we have a foreshadowing of the market economy we know and detest today

S&F for you!

Every now and then you come across some very interesting stuff. These types of finds help give us a glimpse into what the history of this planet would have been like 11,000 + years ago.

The find of the grainary doesn't mean they were intentionaly practicing agriculture, they were harvesting grains growing in the wild, the root of agriculture.
In some areas the wild grasses grew better than other, due to environmental conditions. The early foragers would have noticed this, and returned to the same place each season to harvest the grain. This would have given rise to a semi sedintary lifestyle, and the need to be able to store the crop.




Some of the local native americans built "graineries", large baskets to store acorns, but they were not practicing agriculture they were foragers.

Its a fascinating find but it doesnt nessecarilly mean that they were practicing agriculture per se.

If and when more finds are made maybe well uncover more evidence of a burgeoning agricultural society, but my take is that they were still semi sedintary foragers. just as the article states.

Originally posted by punkinworks
The find of the grainary doesn't mean they were intentionaly practicing agriculture, they were harvesting grains growing in the wild, the root of agriculture.
In some areas the wild grasses grew better than other, due to environmental conditions. The early foragers would have noticed this, and returned to the same place each season to harvest the grain. This would have given rise to a semi sedintary lifestyle, and the need to be able to store the crop.

Some of the local native americans built "graineries", large baskets to store acorns, but they were not practicing agriculture they were foragers.

Its a fascinating find but it doesnt nessecarilly mean that they were practicing agriculture per se.

If and when more finds are made maybe well uncover more evidence of a burgeoning agricultural society, but my take is that they were still semi sedintary foragers. just as the article states.

Your missing the point.

The point is that in order to even have a granary requires a higher level of intellect and technology than currently attributed to the people at the time. Developing a granary requires some considerable foresight into pest control, storage and preservation of crops etc in an era when supposedly people where still making flint tools and poking each other with sticks.



[edit on 24-6-2009 by warrenb]

This is pretty interesting, I found another article on it.

They were certain that the grains found at Gilgal were cultivated and not found naturally in the environment because they were found in such large quantities and because field observations showed that only moderate amounts could be gathered from natural growing sites in this part of the Jordan Valley, even in rainy years.

Although pioneer crops such as barley, lentils, rye and oats yielded satisfactory crops, early farmers faced the problem that their seeds would fall off immediately after ripening. One way to solve this problem was through domestication (causing a process by which plants would retain their seeds, rather than shedding them, to facilitate collection by farmers).

But the researchers found that not all crops were easily domesticated, causing our ancestors, the researchers maintain, to abandon certain crops (such as oats) for thousands of years, until different farmers in other parts of the world finally domesticated them.

Link

Interesting!

it was probably even earlier than 11ky, you don't suddenly invent a grain silo, but the earliest evidence is ,now, 11k years old so they have to say "at least 11ky".

a silo at 11k says to me they were intentionally growing it by 15-16k. to need a silo you need to be good enough at growing to have enough of a excess regularly to need, experiment with and develop a silo. that'ld take 1000's of years in prehistory. there was no writing so every innovation required the chance that the person who happened to have the knowledge passed to them was smart enough, enterprising enough and competent enough to do something new and interesting enough to be worth adopting as standard practice.

that could take a lot of generations.

but these people were every bit as smart and mentally developed as we are, they just didn't get the chance to stand on the sholders of giants, they were the ground floor.

[edit on 24/6/09 by pieman]

I've just found some more details that support the idea that they could have been sowing wild seed and storing the excess for a 'rainy day.'

“The most important implication of our findings is that fundamental social changes occurred before plant domestication, including the establishment of fairly permanent settlements, with communal labor and storage, based on cultivated wild plants,” Kuijt says. Researchers now generally accept that people in the Middle East and Asia must have cultivated wild plants for between 1,000 and 2,000 years, with annual harvests in the fall, before domesticated species appeared, remarks Harvard University archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef. “The discovery in Dhra' provides us with one of the earliest well-built examples” of a food-storage structure from before plants were domesticated, Bar-Yosef says. Storage structures there support the argument that the sowing of wild plants beginning as early as 14,000 to 15,000 years ago led to agriculture, comments archaeologist Mordechai Kislev of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel.

Ancient granaries preceded the Agricultural Revolution

From harvesting the seeds and grain of wild plants (wheat, barley, rice etc) it would only be a matter of time before someone realized how plants were created. It might have been an observation that an area they used to prepare the grain one year became a crop the next. I'm speculating, but it seems reasonable. The guys had the same capacity for observation and extrapolation that we have today. Let's not forget...a group of these guys were as clever as a group of modern guys

reply to post by warrenb


The truth is it is not known when agriculture actually started. This find pushes the date further down a little. If they ever do a thorough study of the underwater ruins around the world, they may find agriculture started 20,000 to 20,000 years ago or beyond.

Give credit where it's due but...

This is interesting but hardly HUGE news. They believed we started about 10,000 years ago but now find it was more like at least 11,000 years. It's not like they found it to be 60,000 years off.

And as far as finding a storage unit for their grains showing a higher level of intellect, maybe, but more likely it just means that when they stored their grains in a pile on the ground it was eaten by rodents and mold so they thought...hmmm how can we keep it safe.... Even squirrels hide nuts and dogs bury bones, doesn''t make them geniuses, just means they figured out if you leave it laying around something else may find it.

I believe we will find primitive man knew more than we thought. They didn't have all the distractions we have today and probably spent a lot of time just sitting around thinking up stuff. However, I don't believe this to be groundbreaking.

Originally posted by pieman
it was probably even earlier than 11ky, you don't suddenly invent a grain silo, but the earliest evidence is ,now, 11k years old so they have to say "at least 11ky".

a silo at 11k says to me they were intentionally growing it by 15-16k. to need a silo you need to be good enough at growing to have enough of a excess regularly to need, experiment with and develop a silo. that'ld take 1000's of years in prehistory. there was no writing so every innovation required the chance that the person who happened to have the knowledge passed to them was smart enough, enterprising enough and competent enough to do something new and interesting enough to be worth adopting as standard practice.

that could take a lot of generations.

but these people were every bit as smart and mentally developed as we are, they just didn't get the chance to stand on the sholders of giants, they were the ground floor.

[edit on 24/6/09 by pieman]

I think you are stretching it a bit with the 1000's of years of development. First you realize leaving your food on the ground is not a good idea. This would most likely happen the first time they tried it and animals, moisture, and mold ravished it. So you build a wall around it. Well, some animals still get in so put a roof. Hmm, moisture still lets mold grow so lets move it to a shelf off the ground so the bottom doesn't stay wet....

I don't see it taking more than a few failed attempts to realize their mistakes and adjust for them. Not generations and 1000 years.

Originally posted by warrenb
This is huge and appears to squish the modern theory that agriculture began a meer 10,000 years ago.

Agriculture was developed at least 10,000 years ago..

en.wikipedia.org...

How can you have a culture with granaries before agriculture was developed?
Our ancestors were alot smarter than we give them credit for.

Yet more evidence that our history is not as we are lead to believe...

[edit on 24-6-2009 by warrenb]

The article said they found wild barley ("wild" being the key word). This only proves they were storing grain -- not cultivating.

...and of course they were smart -- they were modern humans just like us. They had virtually the same brain we have today, therefore they were just as smart as us and just as capable of problem-solving and decision-making.

The one advantage we have over them is our written language. We use our written language to pass our knowledge from one generation to the next to allow that next generation to "build upon" the past generation's knowledge. They may have had some manner of record-keeping, but their knowledge base was small. Our knowledge base is about 5000 years. That's what gives us an advantage over them -- not our brains.

Intelligence and knowledge are two totally different things. So, it may be true that we have more "knowledge" than they did, were are not any more intelligent.

Scientists and anthropologists would not dispute the intelligence of people 10,000 or 20,000 years ago -- mostly because those people are exactly the same as us. They were modern humans who were equally intelligent as we are today. Mainstream anthropologists would agree with that idea.

This does not change the "history of humans" as much as you seem to be implying.


[edit on 6/24/2009 by Soylent Green Is People]

Agriculture does not just "begin" at a certain year. I am sure that man learned how to grow and harvest food from plants long before they started making granaries like this 11,000 year old one. I mean honestly, they found a 35,000 year old flute, what is harder to figure out how to do, harvesting/planting a crop, or carving a flute? I am honestly surprised with most of the information about the ancient world that is regarded as official. I believe very little of it.

this doesnt particularly surprise me. i had assumed that there was this type of thing that predated domestication of plants. gotta store your foraged grains somewhere.

reply to post by deloneninja


There are nomadic tribes that do not practice agriculture much at all, yet have well developed instruments for festivals and ceremonies.
It's not a question of which is easier, but which is focused on more heavily.

Originally posted by warrenb
How can you have a culture with granaries before agriculture was developed?

Maybe they built the granaries and then it took them another thousand years to figure out something useful to do with them.


Just kidding warrenb

It does make you wonder what date revisions we'll see over the next few decades. Particularly with the likes of Robert Ballard now focusing on under-water archaeology of not only marine craft, but cities as well. There might be some interesting surprises coming up.

S&F

Originally posted by warrenb
How can you have a culture with granaries before agriculture was developed?

Maybe they built the granaries and then it took them another thousand years to figure out something useful to do with them.


Just kidding warrenb

It does make you wonder what date revisions we'll see over the next few decades. Particularly with the likes of Robert Ballard now focusing on under-water archaeology of not only marine craft, but cities as well. There might be some interesting surprises coming up.

S&F