Large-scale cereal processing before domestication during the tenth millennium cal BC in northern Syria

Willcox, Georges; Stordeur, Danielle

doi:10.1017/s0003598x00062487

Cited by 101 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 21 publications

(33 reference statements)

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“…Somewhat before 11,000 B.P. there is direct evidence of storage of limited amounts of wild plants outside of dwellings, consistent with the hypothesis that access to stored goods was not limited to the members of a residential unit (2,43). A millennium later, goats and sheep had been domesticated (constituting a substantial investment), and we find large-scale dedicated storage located inside dwellings, suggesting more restricted access (4,44).…”

Section: Process Of Transition In the Archaeological Recordsupporting

confidence: 84%

Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

Bowles

Choi

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

164

125

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The advent of farming around 12 millennia ago was a cultural as well as technological revolution, requiring a new system of property rights. Among mobile hunter-gatherers during the late Pleistocene, food was almost certainly widely shared as it was acquired. If a harvested crop or the meat of a domesticated animal were to have been distributed to other group members, a late Pleistocene would-be farmer would have had little incentive to engage in the required investments in clearing, cultivation, animal tending, and storage. However, the new property rights that farming required-secure individual claims to the products of one's labor-were infeasible because most of the mobile and dispersed resources of a forager economy could not cost-effectively be delimited and defended. The resulting chicken-and-egg puzzle might be resolved if farming had been much more productive than foraging, but initially it was not. Our model and simulations explain how, despite being an unlikely event, farming and a new system of farming-friendly property rights nonetheless jointly emerged when they did. This Holocene revolution was not sparked by a superior technology. It occurred because possession of the wealth of farmers-crops, dwellings, and animals-could be unambiguously demarcated and defended. This facilitated the spread of new property rights that were advantageous to the groups adopting them. Our results thus challenge unicausal models of historical dynamics driven by advances in technology, population pressure, or other exogenous changes. Our approach may be applied to other technological and institutional revolutions such as the 18th-and 19th-century industrial revolution and the information revolution today.agent-based simulation | evolutionary game theory | technical change | institutional change | big history A mong the outstanding puzzles in human social dynamics is the simultaneous emergence and diffusion of novel economic institutions and new technologies. An important example is the appearance of private storage (1-4) and other indicators of individual property (5, 6) along with the advent of farming (7,8), one of the greatest technological-institutional revolutions ever experienced by our species.Economists, archaeologists, and historians often consider advances in technology to be an exogenous driver of innovations in property rights, wealth inheritance practices, or other institutions. Well-studied examples include the social and cultural impacts of the introduction of the horse on the US Great Plains in the 17th century or the sweet potato in the New Guinea Highlands a century later (9, 10). However, the technological and institutional innovations of the early Holocene are difficult to reconcile with this view because, as a number of archaeologists have pointed out (11-13), farming was probably not economically advantageous in many places where it was first introduced. Indeed, recent estimates suggest that the productivity of the first farmers (calories per hour of labor including processing and storage) was proba...

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Section: Process Of Transition In the Archaeological Recordsupporting

confidence: 84%

Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

Bowles

Choi

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

164

125

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“…These periods lasted for many centuries before fully domesticated cereals appeared, as has been inferred from evidence in the Near East and China (7,31,35). Instances of PDC have also recently been documented in northwestern South America (36).…”

Section: Early Domestication Stagesmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…There are other indications in the Near East of long periods of cultivation without morphological evidence of domestication, including specific field weed flora associated with morphologically wild cereals and legumes, and large stores, suggesting reliance on cultivated production of morphologically wild species (30,31). Doust et al (32) show that factors previously underappreciated, such as GxE (gene-by-environment) and epistasis (gene-by-gene) interactions may have been important in slowing domestication rates.…”

Section: Early Domestication Stagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Current perspectives and the future of domestication studies

Larson

Piperno

Allaby

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

634

544

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It is difficult to overstate the cultural and biological impacts that the domestication of plants and animals has had on our species. Fundamental questions regarding where, when, and how many times domestication took place have been of primary interest within a wide range of academic disciplines. Within the last two decades, the advent of new archaeological and genetic techniques has revolutionized our understanding of the pattern and process of domestication and agricultural origins that led to our modern way of life. In the spring of 2011, 25 scholars with a central interest in domestication representing the fields of genetics, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, geoarchaeology, and archaeology met at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center to discuss recent domestication research progress and identify challenges for the future. In this introduction to the resulting Special Feature, we present the state of the art in the field by discussing what is known about the spatial and temporal patterns of domestication, and controversies surrounding the speed, intentionality, and evolutionary aspects of the domestication process. We then highlight three key challenges for future research. We conclude by arguing that although recent progress has been impressive, the next decade will yield even more substantial insights not only into how domestication took place, but also when and where it did, and where and why it did not.The domestication of plants and animals was one of the most significant cultural and evolutionary transitions in the ∼200,000-y history of our species. Investigating when, where, and how domestication took place is therefore crucial for understanding the roots of complex societies. Domestication research is equally important to scholars from a wide range of disciplines, from evolutionary biology to sustainability science (1, 2). Research into both the process and spatiotemporal origins of domestication has accelerated significantly over the past decade through archaeological research, advances in DNA/ RNA sequencing technology, and methods used to recover and formally identify changes in interactions among plants and animals leading to domestication (2-4). In the spring of 2011, 25 scholars with a central interest in domestication and representing the fields of genetics, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, geoarchaeology, and archaeology met at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center to discuss recent progress in domestication research and identify challenges for the future. Our goal was to begin reconsidering plant and animal domestication within an integrated evolutionary and cultural framework that takes into account not just new genetic and archaeological data, but also ideas related to epigenetics, plasticity, geneby-environment interactions, gene-culture coevolution, and niche construction. Each of these concepts is relevant to understanding phenotypic change, heritability, and selection, and they are all fundamental components of the New Biology (5) and Expanded Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (6).

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“…The African archaeological record hints at associations between the proliferation of grinding-stone tools, intensified plant resource consumption, and transitions to food production. The presence of grinding-stones has been used as proxy evidence for the exploitation of ground cereal grains and the subsequent development of food production in Africa (e.g., Camps 1980;McBurney 1967;Robertshaw and Collett 1983) and elsewhere (e.g., Byrd 1989;Diehl 1996;Gilman 1988;Hard et al 1996;Henry 1989;Lancaster 1984;Mauldin 1993;Morris 1990;Plog 1974;Willcox and Stordeur 2012). However, the intensified processing of plant resources with grinding-stone tools does not always have to be evaluated as an indicator of cereal domestication.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Back to the Grindstone? The Archaeological Potential of Grinding-Stone Studies in Africa with Reference to Contemporary Grinding Practices in Marakwet, Northwest Kenya

2017

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This article presents observations on grinding-stone implements and their uses in ElgeyoMarakwet County, northwest Kenya. Tool use in Marakwet is contextualized with a select overview of literature on grinding-stones in Africa. Grinding-stones in Marakwet are incorporated not only into quotidian but also into more performative and ritual aspects of life. These tools have distinct local traditions laden with social as well as functional importance. It is argued that regionally and temporally specific studies of grindingstone tool assemblages can be informative on the processing of various substances. Despite being common occurrences, grinding-stone tools are an underdiscussed component of many African archaeological assemblages. Yet the significance of grinding-stones must be reevaluated, as they hold the potential to inform on landscapes of past food and material processing.Résumé Cet article présente des observations ethnoarchéologiques sur les outils de pierre meulière et leur utilisation dans le comté d'Elgeyo-Marakwet, au nordouest du Kenya. En s'appuyant notamment sur des exemples issus de la période néolithique pastorale en Afrique de l'Est, il contextualise l'utilisation d'outils à Marakwet en termes d'études sélectionnées portent sur les pierres de meulage en Afrique. Nous soutenons que les études spécifiques à la région portent sur les assemblages d'outils de pierre meulière peuvent aider à avancer nos connaissances sur le traitement de diverses substances. Par ailleurs nous constatons que la pierre meulière fait partie non seulement de la vie quotidienne, mais aussi des aspects performatifs et rituels de la vie à Marakwet. Les outils de pierre meulière font partie des traditions locales distinctes, chargées d'importance sociale et fonctionnelle. Malgré le fait qu'ils soient banals, les outils de pierre meulière sont des composants significatif et pourtant peu discutés de nombreux assemblages archéologiques africains. Nous avançons que la signification de la pierre meulière doive-t-être réévaluée, car elle est essentielle pour mieux comprendre les circonstances de l'alimentation et du traitement des matériaux dans le passé.

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Large-scale cereal processing before domestication during the tenth millennium cal BC in northern Syria

Cited by 101 publications

References 21 publications

Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

Current perspectives and the future of domestication studies

Back to the Grindstone? The Archaeological Potential of Grinding-Stone Studies in Africa with Reference to Contemporary Grinding Practices in Marakwet, Northwest Kenya

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