Until now there was a consensus among historians and archaeologists: agriculture was born about 12,000 years ago in the so-called Fertile Crescent , a wedge of territory that extends through present-day Turkey, Egypt and the Middle East. But a sensational discovery just published in PLOS ONE magazine puts that date in question. And it does so not for a hundred, two hundred years or a millennium: the first human crops would date back … 23,000 years! In other words, agriculture would have been invented 11,000 years earlier than previously thought.
The researchers are based on plant remains found in a prehistoric settlement on the shores of Lake Tiberias (Israel). "Although large-scale agriculture would come much later, our discovery makes us rethink the abilities of our ancestors, " said Marcelo Sternbeng, from Tel Aviv University, one of the study's co-authors. Experts from the universities of Harvard (USA), Bar-Ilan and Haifa, the latter two from Israel, have also participated.
The finding is part of the investigation of a town of hunter-gatherers (the Oaho II people), where approximately 150,000 specimens of plants have been examined. Among them were thirteen species of herbs mixed with edible grains, such as wild oats, barley, and wheat. They also found sickle-shaped metal blades and a stone tool to extract the grains of the cereals and seeds of those plants around , indicating that they were processed for consumption.
