“Founder crops” v. wild plants: Assessing the plant-based diet of the last hunter-gatherers in southwest Asia (original) (raw)
Related papers
Hunter-gatherer plant use in south west Asia: the path to agriculture
Karen Hardy and Lucy Kubiak-Martens (eds.) Wild Harvest: Plants in the Hominin and Pre-Agrarian Human Worlds. Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2016., 2016
This paper focuses on plant use by the last hunter-gatherers in the Levant from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to the first experiments with plant cultivation at the beginning of the Holocene. This review of Epipaleolithic and Early Neolithic plant use summarises available archaeobotanical and technological data. Information far the Early Epipalaeolithic, especially from the site of Ohalo II, shows that, from the LGM, humans had access to exceptionally rich plant,food staples that included smallgrained grasses and wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum) and wild wheat (Triticum dicoccoides). Grasses seem to have been the staple plant foods but other plants were also present: wild pulses, acorns, almonds, pistachios, wild olives, fruits, and berries. Grinding and pounding stone tools were in use at this time far processing plant resources. During the Late Epipaleolithic (Natufian) period plant use intensified, as can be seen in the site of Abu Hureyra. The seed assemblage from Abu Hureyra I may have included more than 120 food types comprising possible staples such as the grain of wild rye (Secale spp.) and wheat (Triticum spp.), feather grasses (Stipa and Stipagrostis spp.), club-rush (Scirpus maritimus), Euphrates knotgrass (Polygonum corrigioloides), small-seeded grasses, and wild shrubby chenopods (Atriplex spp. and others). The presence in Natufian siles of tools with glossy edges that were used for harvesting cereals, and the widespread nature of mortars suggest that cereals were a more common food. During the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), the first experiments with cultivation of morphologically wild cereals, and also probably of legumes, took place. This involved cereals such as wild emmer (T. dicoccoides), wild einkorn (T. boeoticum), wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum) and wild oat (Avena sterilis), and pulses such as rambling vetch (Vicia peregrina) and probably others. Human manipulalion of plant resources opened the path to domestication with the first evidence found during the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (EPPNB). However, the exploitation of wild plants continued to be important far these societies, as is suggested by the admixture of plant exploitation strategies during most of the PPN period and the late establishment of crop 'packages' during the Late PPNB.
Plant domestication in the Neolithic Near East: The humans-plants liaison
Quaternary Science Reviews, 2020
Plant domestication is often discussed as a form of mutualism between humans and crop plants. Ethnographies provide records of a multitude of adaptive strategies employed by human societies with varying degrees of reliance on manipulation of wild plant resources. These manipulations have included vegetation clearance, controlled burning, pruning, coppicing, tilling, sowing and more. Such activities can be viewed as cultivation of wild plants (known as "pre-domestication cultivation" in the Near Eastern research milieu, or in a somewhat different framework as "low level food production"), often considered a necessary step leading to domestication. Since cultivated fields are constructed niches, Niche Construction Theory (NCT) has recently been recruited to provide a theoretical evolutionary framework for explaining plant domestication. This review on plant domestication in the Near East discusses elements that we consider intimately related to the abovementioned trajectories of thought: the concept of "predomestication cultivation"; the view that domesticated plants arose via evolutionary mutualism; and the conceptualization of plant domestication in terms of NCT. We review and discuss the logic of these approaches, their biological, cultural and archaeological foundations; and highlight their association with the old "dump heap" scenario. We argue that based on the biology of the Near Eastern crop plants and the available archaeological evidence, these approached and respective arguments are inadequate. Rather, we contend that the biological idiosyncrasies of the Near Eastern founder crops depict a picture of a knowledge-based and conscious domestication that emanated from the newly emerging Neolithic world view and Humans-World relationships.
On the 'lost' crops of the neolithic Near East
Journal of Experimental Botany, 2013
The claim that the 'classic' eight 'founder crop' package (einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch, and flax) underlying the emergence of agriculture in the Near East is a relic of a larger number of domesticated species is addressed. The 'lost' crops concept relies on the idea that additional taxa were at certain points in time and in certain locations genuine crops, which were later abandoned. The issue is highly relevant to the debate concerning mono-versus polyphyletic domestication, because if there were numerous 'false starts' that were subsequently lost, this implies that plant domestication occurred over a protracted time period, and across a wide geographic range. Different criteria were used for declaring those taxa as 'lost' crops, including, but not limited to (i) identification in archaeobotanical assemblages of grains from species which are not known as crops at present; (ii) identification of such grains in what is interpreted to have been Neolithic storage facilities; and (iii) recent botanical observations on populations of crop wild relatives in disturbed habitats. The evidence for four presumed 'lost' crops (wild oat, rambling vetch, rye, and wild black lentil) and the broad bean is evaluated, and discussed in light of data on Croatian and Israeli wild pea, and Moroccan wild lentil in disturbed habitats. Based on present knowledge, the broad bean might emerge as a founder crop (without an identified wild progenitor). The same may hold true for rye, which was never lost since its adoption in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period in Anatolia. In the remaining three cases, there are alternative, more likely, explanations for the archaeological finds or the recent botanical observations rather than 'lost' domestication episodes.
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany
Archaeobotanical evidence from southwest Asia is often interpreted as showing that the spectrum of wild plant foods narrowed during the origins of agriculture, but it has long been acknowledged that the recognition of wild plants as foods is problematic. Here, we systematically combine compositional and contextual evidence to recognise the wild plants for which there is strong evidence of their deliberate collection as food at pre-agricultural and early agricultural sites across southwest Asia. Through sample-by-sample analysis of archaeobotanical remains, a robust link is established between the archaeological evidence and its interpretation in terms of food use, which permits a re-evaluation of the evidence for the exploitation of a broad spectrum of wild plant foods at pre-agricultural sites, and the extent to which this changed during the development of early agriculture. Our results show that relatively few of the wild taxa found at pre-and early agricultural sites can be confidently recognised as contributing to the human diet, and we found no evidence for a narrowing of the plant food spectrum during the adoption of agriculture. This has implications for how we understand the processes leading to the domestication of crops, and points towards a mutualistic relationship between people and plants as a driving force during the development of agriculture.
On the Origin of Near Eastern Founder Crops and the ‘Dump-heap Hypothesis’
Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution, 2005
The transition from hunting gathering to a farming based economy -the Neolithic Revolution, was a crucial junction in the human career, attracting the attention of many scholars: archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, botanists, geneticists and evolutionists among others. Our understanding of this major transformation is rather limited mainly due to the inability to fully reconstruct the cultural, biological and environmental setup of the relevant period and organisms involved. Many students of the subject of plant domestication have seriously entertained the hypothesis that man's first crop plants have originated from weeds associated with the disturbed habitats surrounding pre-agricultural ancient human dwellings and or with human refuse heaps -the so called 'dump heap hypothesis'. In this paper we reexamine this hypothesis in light of the known biology of the Near Eastern founder crops and the ecological preferences of their wild progenitors. Contrary to the 'dump-heap hypothesis', we propose that Near Eastern farming originated as a result of a long term interaction between humans and plants and was mainly driven by the nutritional features of the respective crops and cultural forces.
the taxonomic composition of charred archaeobotanical assemblages. Considering these results, we discuss the subsistence economy of Chogha Golan. Domestic emmer wheat was cultivated from AH II onwards. Wild barley, Aegilops sp., lentils, peas and various vetches may have been cultivated as well. This spectrum of typical Neolithic food plants was supplemented by a high diversity of other potential wild food resources, including medium and smallseeded grasses, Pistacia, Bolboschoenus glaucus, Malva and Brassicaceae. A compilation of ethnobotanical data, mainly from the Near and Middle East, represents the basis for assessing the potential uses of the wild plants.
Quaternary Science Reviews, 2014
In this paper we estimate the degree to which the range and proportion of wild plant foods are underrepresented in samples of charred botanical remains from archaeological sites. We systematically compare the differences between central European Neolithic archaeobotanical assemblages that have been preserved by charring compared to those preserved by waterlogging. Charred archaeobotanical assemblages possess on aggregate about 35% of the range of edible plants documented in waterlogged samples from wetland settlements. We control for the ecological availability of wetland versus terrestrial wild plant foods on assemblage composition and diversity, and demonstrate that the significantly broader range of wild plant food taxa represented is primarily a function of preservation rather than subsistence practices. We then consider whether observed fluctuations in the frequency of edible wild taxa over time can also be attributed to preservation, and demonstrate that it cannot; and thus conclude that there are significant changes in plant food diets during the Neolithic that reflect different strategies of land use and, over time, a decreasing reliance on foraging for wild plant foods. The wild species included in our analyses are not spatially restricteddthey are common throughout central Europe. We maintain, therefore, that our results are relevant beyond our study area and more generally illustrate the challenges of attempting to reconstruct the relative importance of wild plant foodsdand thus plant diet breadthdin Neolithic archaeobotanical assemblages from charred data alone.