Synchronous Environmental and Cultural Change in the Emergence of Agricultural Economies 10,000 Years Ago in the Levant

Borrell, Ferran; Junno, Aripekka; Barceló, Joan

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0134810

Cited by 40 publications

(38 citation statements)

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“…Significantly, the anthropological view admits that NCT encompasses the niche-altering activities of all organisms, but then sees humans as the ultimate niche constructors [82]. A more nuanced claim, by an evolutionary biologist, is that the core idea of NCT is of the evolved properties of organisms making some aspects of the environment relevant sources of natural selection, and screening off others, thereby helping to shape and constrain likely paths of the population's evolution [65].…”

Section: Explanatory Power Of the Lam Syndrome Versus Niche Constructmentioning

confidence: 99%

A natural adaptive syndrome as a model for the origins of cereal agriculture

Wood¹,

Lenné²

2018

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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A novel explanation of the origin of cereal agriculture is proposed, based on the ecology and adaptive morphology of wild cereals ancestral to our founder cereals (einkorn, emmer and barley). Wild cereals are unusually largeseeded. A natural evolutionary-ecological syndrome relates large seed, awns and monodominance (LAM). Awns bury attached seeds in the soil, protecting seed from fire; buried seed needs to be large to emerge on germination; large seeds, growing without competition from small-seeded plants, will produce monodominant vegetation. Climatic and edaphic instability at the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary would have provided an impetus for the spread of annual ruderal grasses. LAM grassland provided an obvious natural model for the origins of cereal agriculture. Subsequent field management would mimic the natural niche (MNN). The fact that monodominance is a long-standing character of the natural LAM syndrome validates cereal monocultures (now producing most of our food). An alternative explanation of crop domestication, by auditioning a great range of species for a human-constructed niche (NCT), is rejected.

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Section: Explanatory Power Of the Lam Syndrome Versus Niche Constructmentioning

confidence: 99%

A natural adaptive syndrome as a model for the origins of cereal agriculture

Wood¹,

Lenné²

2018

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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“…In the following, we continue our previous WDTstudies with subordinate further consideration of the available 14 C-data, which have already undergone sufficient analysis (e.g., Weninger et al 2009;Asouti, Fuller 2013;Borrell et al 2015). Instead, let us have a fresh look at the remarkable coincidence of the WDT with the previously identified major increase in precipitation levels in large parts of the Near East at around 10.2 ka cal BP.…”

Section: Archaeological Examples Of Punctuated Equilibriummentioning

confidence: 80%

“…This property makes the movement of domesticated plants beyond ~5 0m dependent on human agency (Honne, Heun 2011;Heun et al 2012), and/or (B) in genetic isolation of mixed W/D-cereals due to the colonisation of Cyprus and (amplifying) back-transport of domesticated cereals to the mainland (Lucas et al 2012), and/or (C) abrupt changes in precipitation that occurred around 10.2 ± 0.2 ka cal BP (Fig. 1); and/or (D) the occurrence of a brief (decadel-scale) cold-winter RCCextreme event at around 10.2 ± 0.2 ka calBP (BarYosef 1986;Weninger et al 2009;Borrell et al 2015), but with presumably a different impact in the northern and southern Levant (Cheng et al 2015), and/or (E) the major geographic dispersal of the Neolithic at around 10.2 ± 0.2 ka calBP into Central Anatolia and Iran that would itself have presumably caused the (further) genetic isolation of WD-transitional plants and animals (cf. Brandolini et al 2016); as well as, most importantly, (F) short-and long-distance exchange/trade in domesticates, as proposed by Heun et al 2012), and finally, (G) an amplifying combination of factors (A-F).…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is also unfortunate that the postulated social resilience to climate change does not even theoretically follow from its non-identification (Flohr et al 2015). A more promising approach lies in dedicated climate-archaeological fieldwork (e.g., Zielhofer et al 2012).In the following, we continue our previous WDTstudies with subordinate further consideration of the available 14 C-data, which have already undergone sufficient analysis (e.g., Weninger et al 2009;Asouti, Fuller 2013;Borrell et al 2015). Instead, let us have a fresh look at the remarkable coincidence of the WDT with the previously identified major increase in precipitation levels in large parts of the Near East at around 10.2 ka cal BP.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Niche Construction and Theory of Agricultural Origins. Case studies in punctuated equilibrium

Weninger

2017

Doc. praeh.

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IntroductionA central challenge to the theory of agricultural origins (TAO) concerns the integration and joint interpretation of the increasingly large amounts of numeric empirical data made available by participating scientific disciplines, for example, cultural studies, archaeobotany, archaeozoology, plant and animal genetics, radiometric dating, palaeogeography, palaeoclimatology, and others. In a recently published study, Kristen Gremillion et al. (2014) have argued that it may be possible to unify the scientific results pertaining to TAO under the umbrella of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. To the same topic, Kim Niche construction and theory of agricultural origins. Case studies in punctuated equilibrium 7 of plants and animals, both microscopic and macroscopic, including humans (Gould, Eldredge 1977;Gould 1989;Jones et al. 1994;Laland et al. 2016;Saltz et al. 2016;Zeder 2016). NCT is equally promising for applications in archaeology, for which purpose even the elementary (unpretentious) renaming of the Neolithic Package as a mobile eco-system that is capable of environmental or climatic habitattracking may help students and researchers alike to achieve a qualitatively better understanding of the complex processes underlying Neolithisation. In the long run, however, quantitative modelling of archaeological NCT appears to be necessary. Punctuated Equilibrium (PE)In the following, let us explore what might happen in archaeological NCT discourse if concepts derived from the neo-darwinian theory of punctuated equilibrium (Gould, Eldredge 1977;Gould 2007) are taken into consideration. In contrast to classical Darwinian forecasting, the geological record shows not a slow and continuous fossil development (graduation), but instead long periods of stasis with no observable change. Then follows an abrupt switch from one species to the next (punctuation), with no apparent transition. According to Darwin's (and others'), explanation, the geological observation of a seemingly abrupt and quasi-instantaneous origination of new palaeontological species is caused by the notoriously imperfect character of the fossil record due to stratigraphic disturbance, incomplete preservation, and fragmentary research (Gould, Eldredge 1993.223). For PE theory, in contrast, the abrupt origination of species is the result neither of noisy or missing data, nor of an unobserved geographic switch in habitat, but the expected and meaningful consequence of a rapid genetic switch from one species to the next, following the law of natural selection. In a nutshell, most species originate in such brief moments of time, that expected 'transitions' have no apparent manifestation in the geological stratigraphy (Gould 2007).But how does PE work? As indicated above, many PE related processes are (today) subsumed under what is more commonly called the Theory of Complex Systems (or similar), but I propose we continue to use the term PE. An example from physics would be coulomb excitation, whereby a subatomic particle passes so close to an atomic nuc...

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“…Several authors have recently applied the summed radiocarbon technique to corpuses of dates from SW Asia, focused primarily on the Pleistocene-Holocene transition (Borrell, Junno, & Barcelo, 2015;Flohr et al, 2016;Roberts et al, 2018). The overall trend evident in each study is one of the exponential population growth, with a marked "boom" beginning around 14.5 ka.…”

Section: Modelling Human Water Demandmentioning

confidence: 99%

20,000 years of societal vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in southwest Asia

et al. 2019

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The Fertile Crescent, its hilly flanks and surrounding drylands has been a critical region for studying how climate has influenced societal change, and this review focuses on the region over the last 20,000 years. The complex social, economic, and environmental landscapes in the region today are not new phenomena and understanding their interactions requires a nuanced, multidisciplinary understanding of the past. This review builds on a history of collaboration between the social and natural palaeoscience disciplines. We provide a multidisciplinary, multiscalar perspective on the relevance of past climate, environmental, and archaeological research in assessing present day vulnerabilities and risks for the populations of southwest Asia. We discuss the complexity of palaeoclimatic data interpretation, particularly in relation to hydrology, and provide an overview of key time periods of palaeoclimatic interest. We discuss the critical role that vegetation plays in the human–climate–environment nexus and discuss the implications of the available palaeoclimate and archaeological data, and their interpretation, for palaeonarratives of the region, both climatically and socially. We also provide an overview of how modelling can improve our understanding of past climate impacts and associated change in risk to societies. We conclude by looking to future work, and identify themes of “scale” and “seasonality” as still requiring further focus. We suggest that by appreciating a given locale's place in the regional hydroscape, be it an archaeological site or palaeoenvironmental archive, more robust links to climate can be made where appropriate and interpretations drawn will demand the resolution of factors acting across multiple scales. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Science of Water > Water and Environmental Change Water and Life > Nature of Freshwater Ecosystems

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Synchronous Environmental and Cultural Change in the Emergence of Agricultural Economies 10,000 Years Ago in the Levant

Cited by 40 publications

References 61 publications

A natural adaptive syndrome as a model for the origins of cereal agriculture

A natural adaptive syndrome as a model for the origins of cereal agriculture

Niche Construction and Theory of Agricultural Origins. Case studies in punctuated equilibrium

20,000 years of societal vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in southwest Asia

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