Evidence of Grain Storage Predates Agriculture

Article at Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, complete with photographs, technical information, and proposed reconstructions of what the structures looked like. Evidence for food storage and predomestication granaries 11,000 years ago in the Jordan Valley Ian Kuijt (a,1) and Bill Finlayson(b) (a)Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556; and (b)Council for British Research in the Levant, Jubaiha, Amman 11941, Jordan Edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved May 15, 2009 (received for review December 16, 2008) Published online before print June 22, 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0812764106 Here's a less technical summary from Yahoo.news: Study: Food storage began well before farming Associated Press Mon Jun 22, 5:51 pm ET WASHINGTON – People were storing grain long before they learned to domesticate crops, a new study indicates. A structure used as a food granary discovered in recent excavations in Jordan dates to about 11,300 years ago, according to a report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That's as much as a thousand years before people in the Middle East domesticated grain, the research team led by anthropologist Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame said. Remains of wild barley were found in the structure, indicating that the grain was collected and saved even though formal cultivation had not yet developed. The granary was between two other structures used for grain processing and residences, discovered in excavations at Dhra', near the Dead Sea. The granary was round with walls of stone and mud. The researchers said it had a raised floor for air circulation and protection from rodents. The ability to store food is essential for the development of farming, the researchers said. "The granaries represent a critical evolutionary shift in the relationship between people and plant foods, which precedes the emergence of domestication and large-scale sedentary communities by at least 1,000 years," they reported. The research was funded by the British Academy, the Council for British Research in the Levant, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the University of Notre Dame.