An Uzbekistan cave holds an ancient agricultural secret

The Neolithic era marked ancient humanity’s giant leap from hunting and gathering to agriculture— but it didn’t happen in one specific place. Instead, farming developed in multiple places and times, including the Americas, eastern Asia, and Africa. Meanwhile, how it developed all depended upon where you were located. For example, paleoarchaeologists believe that the first to cultivate barley, legumes, and wheat was a Levant culture known as the Natufians, about 10,000 years ago. The Natifians lived in the Fertile Crescent, a Middle Eastern region hosting the earliest known agricultural evidence.

However, researchers have added new layers to the complicated and overlapping history. According to a study published on August 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, experts uncovered similar grain cultivation practices may have been occurring at the same time as much as 900 miles away.

In 2019, an international team of archaeologists began digging in Toda Cave, a site in southern Uzbekistan’s Surkandarya Valley. They excavated several artifacts including charcoal, stone tools, and plant remnants from inside the cave’s oldest layers. The finds are at least 9,200 years old, while additional archaeobotanical research showed the cave’s occupants had collected wild barley, pistachios, and apples.

Additionally, use-wear analysis strongly suggests that the Neolithic community used their stone blades and flakes similar to sickles. These cutting patterns align with other sites around the globe with confirmed agricultural techniques.

“This discovery should change the way that scientists think about the transition from foraging to farming, as it shows how widespread the transitional behaviors were,” Xinying Zhou, a study co-author from China’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, said in a statement.

The researchers contend that the Toda Cave discoveries directly link the ancient hunter-forager culture to communal practices that would lead to their own dawn of agriculture almost in tandem with the Natufians, but hundreds of miles away.

“A growing body of research suggests that domestication occurred without deliberate human intent, and the finding that people continually developed the behaviors which lead to agriculture supports this view,” explained study co-author Robert Spengler at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology.

Further surveys are needed before Xinying, Spengler, and colleagues can determine the extent of these early traditions across a wider swath of Central Asia. They also hope to investigate if the grains offer an early example of wild barley cultivation. If so, it would suggest yet another ancient hub of experimental farming— either separate from the Fertile Crescent, or one that arrived in the area much earlier than currently thought. Regardless of these outcomes, the latest finds can better contextualize the larger picture of humanity’s technological, social, and agricultural evolution.

 

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