Intact Containers Containing Barley Uncovered at Catalhoyuk

Holy Hathor!  I love that ongoing excavavations are taking place at this site.  What else will be uncovered as time goes on...

From PAP Science and Scholarship in Poland

Poles discovered an over 8 thousand years old grain storage in Turkey

20.01.2014

The largest so far known in the Middle East amount of grain of the Neolithic period in a perfect state of preservation has been discovered by Polish archaeologists in Çatalhöyük, a famous archaeological site in Turkey.
 

Çatalhöyük is one of the largest urban centers of first farmers and one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world.

"In a small room with an area of approximately 7 m2 we discovered four clay containers. Each contained barley" - explained project pleader Prof. Arkadiusz Marciniak from the Institute of Prehistory, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.

In total, from each of the two studied containers archaeologists recovered almost 5 kg of grain. Such amount and such a good state of preservation is a global scale phenomenon. In addition, a different grain cluster was discovered in the room. Archeobotanical analysis showed that it was an extinct species of wheat, popular in Neolithic times in the Middle East and Europe. The room in which the discovery was made was situated in the north-eastern part of the homestead - it belonged to a larger residential building, inhabited 8,200 years ago. It was the final period of the large settlement. According to Prof. Marciniak, only few inhabited households remained on the hill at the time.

The entire structure will be exploted in the coming research seasons. It is known already that the grain storage must have burned down: grain was charred at the temperature of several hundred degrees. Nevertheless, archaeologists were able to determine that the walls of the room were whitened from the inside. In addition to the grain containers, archaeologists found several ceramic vessels, also used for storage.

Çatalhöyük is located in the southern part of the Anatolian Plateau (central Turkey). So far, Polish excavations have focused in the central part of the tell - an artificial hill formed as a result of centuries of settlement. Currently, during the second season, archaeologists explore a part of the south slope.

The first excavations at Çatalhöyük were conducted in the 1960s by British archaeologists James Mellaart. The research was resumed only in 1993. International team is headed by Prof. Ian Hodder of Stanford University. Polish archaeologists joined the project in 2001.

Çatalhöyük was inhabited continuously for 1200 years between 7200 and 6000 BC. It is estimated that during its heyday, the densely built-up settlement with an area of dozens of acres had 6000 residents. The site became famous due to the paintings which decorated the walls of houses and other plastic interior decorations. They depicted human and animal figures as well as geometric motifs. An interesting fact is that the dead were buried under the floors of houses.

Last year's excavations continued from June to August. The work was possible with financial support of the National Science Centre under the Harmony programme.

PAP - Science and Scholarship in Poland, Szymon Zdziebłowski

szz/ agt/

tr. RL

Farming Invented at Least Twice -- Once on the Persian Plateau

Absolutely fascinating.  I've long believed that if there is some truth, however mangled, in the old biblical accounts, then maybe, just maybe, the biblical traditionalists are looking for the remains of Noah's ark in the wrong area (Ararat in Turkey).  To my train of thought, it follows that when Noah and his family eventually disembarked the ark (har!), it wasn't too long thereafter that the first evidences of agriculture appeared in our archaeological record, including the first evidence of deliberate grape-growing (called "vineyards" but methinks they weren't anything like the vineyards of today).  Just imagine...

From sciencemag.org

Farming was so Nice, It was Invented at Least Twice

by Michael Balter on 4 July 2013, 2:15 PM

 

The invention of farming some 10,000 years ago set the stage for the rise of civilizations in the Near East. Yet archaeologists disagree about how it happened. Some say it arose in a single spot near the Mediterranean, and spread from there. Others argue it had multiple independent origins, a view that is getting new credence, thanks to findings from an early farming site in Iran.

 

Whether farming arose once or a hundred times, it happened first in the Fertile Crescent, a broad region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to Iran. Most research over the past decades has focused on the western stretches of the Fertile Crescent—including modern-day Israel, Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Turkey—in large part because those were the easiest areas to work in, both logistically and politically. Recent excavations in those areas have suggested that hunter-gatherers first began to gather and plant seeds from wild cereals and legumes, such as wheat, barley, and lentils, as early as 13,000 years ago. Over a few thousand years of such cultivation, the wild forms of these plants mutated into new, domesticated species that were easier to manage and harvest, making farming more productive and efficient.

 

Until recently, the oldest known farming villages had been found at sites in Palestine, Syria, and eastern Turkey, where archaeologists radiocarbon dated the earliest domesticated plant species to about 10,500 years ago. Only a few sites were known as far east as Iran, and most of them had been excavated in the 1960s and 1970s, before that country's 1979 Islamic Revolution made it nearly impossible for Western archaeologists to work there—and also before the advent of modern archaeobotanical techniques that make it much easier for researchers to recover tell-tale plant remains.

 

About five years ago, archaeologist Nicholas Conard and archaeobotanist Simone Riehl of the University of Tübingen in Germany hooked up with researchers at the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research (ICAR) in Tehran, and particularly Mohsen Zeidi, an experienced ICAR excavator, to begin work at the early farming village of Chogha Golan, in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in western Iran. Iranian archaeologists had discovered the village about 15 years earlier, but never fully excavated it. While digging in 2009 and 2010, the team uncovered extensive evidence for the processing of plants in the village, including mortars, pestles, and grinding stones. The dig also yielded a huge quantity—more than 21,000 individual pieces—of charred plant remains, which Riehl analyzed for a report online today in Science.

 

Radiocarbon dating of the archaeological deposits, some 8 meters in depth, showed that Chogha Golan had been occupied continuously between about 12,000 and 9,700 years ago or even later . That allowed Riehl and her colleagues to trace the use of plants over that entire period of time. They found that the people of Chogha Golan apparently began cultivating wild barley, wheat, and lentils more than 11,500 years ago, and that domesticated forms of wheat appeared about 9,800 years ago, nearly as early as at sites to the west. The team concludes that the advent of farming at Chogha Golan, and in the eastern Fertile Crescent, was an independent event that paralleled developments much farther west. This suggests, researchers say, that farming was more or less inevitable once the Ice Age had ended and climatic and environmental conditions were right for it, rather than being a fluke that arose in just one location.

 

"These results do support the idea of multiple origins of agriculture," says Roger Matthews, an archaeologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. He adds that the findings are consistent with recent DNA studies that also suggest multiple origins for both domesticated plants and animals. They also echo work that he, along with other British and Iranian archaeologists, has carried out at another Iranian site called Sheikh-e Abad, where it appears that wild goats were herded and penned, "a transitional stage between wild and domesticated that matches well with the transitional stages in plant use" found at Chogha Golan.

 

George Willcox, an archaeobotanist affiliated with the University of Lyon in France, agrees that the geographical distance of the Zagros Mountains from the western Fertile Crescent could suggest an independent origin for crop cultivation. But he cautions that "it is too early to argue one way or the other" whether the actual domestication of cereals, as opposed to cultivation of wild forms, was an independent event. It is still possible, Willcox says, that the domesticated wheat found at Chogha Golan, which at 9800 years was several hundred years younger than the earliest known domesticated species, was introduced from further west.

Prehistoric Egyptian Site Safe - for Now

From the Huffington Post
Egypt's Revolution May Save Neolithic Site That Holds Nation's Oldest Evidence Of Agriculture
Story from Reuters
Posted: 06/ 2/11 11:21 AM ET

LAKE QARUN, Egypt (Reuters) – Egypt's popular uprising may have arrived just in time to save a Neolithic site that holds the country's oldest evidence of agriculture and could yield vital clues to the rise of Pharaonic civilization.

The site lies in a protected nature reserve along the shore north of Lake Qarun that until recently had remained virtually untouched, even though it lies only 70 km (43.50 miles) from Cairo, Egypt's fast-expanding capital.

A month before the protests that toppled President Hosni Mubarak erupted in January, the Egyptian government carved 2.8 square kilometers of prime land from the reserve and awarded it to property developer Amer Group for a tourist resort.

Since Mubarak was ousted, three government ministers who sat on a committee that approved the sale have been jailed while they battle corruption charges not related to the Amer deal.

One of them, Housing Minister Ahmed el-Maghrabi, told Reuters in January that archaeology officials had given the re-development the necessary green light.

Egypt's archaeology chief now says that was untrue.

"I did not give any permission to anyone. The excavations are not finished," Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council for Antiquities, told Reuters.

Property developers have come under increasing public scrutiny for their land purchases from Mubarak's government, and some firms have relinquished tracts of land.

Egyptian conservation groups have decried the Amer deal, saying it was done without proper oversight and that the arrival of large numbers of holidaymakers would wreak heavy damage to a wide swathe of the delicate desert landscape.

"This is the thin end of the wedge. It is the destruction of Egyptian natural heritage for future generations." said Ali Fahmi, director of the conservation group Friends of Lake Qarun. "It sets a precedent in desecrating a protected area."

WHALE, PRIMATE FOSSILS

Egypt's cabinet in 1989 declared 1,110 square km north of the lake a nature protectorate, an area that also contains unique geology, Pharaonic basalt quarries from the Old Kingdom and fossils of early whales and primates.

Archaeologists say the remains of rain-based Neolithic farming in the reserve may hold vital clues to a technological leap that led to irrigation-based farming along the Nile.

Around 4,000 BC, humans occupying a strip along the northern shore of the lake seized a window of only a few centuries of rainfall to grow grain in previously inhospitable desert, archaeologists say.

"We have the evidence of the earliest agriculture activity in Egypt. So it's before the Pharaohs, it's before the early dynastic period when Egypt becomes a state," said Willeke Wendrich, an archaeology professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.

"What we have on the north shore of Fayoum is something unique worldwide. What we have is a Neolithic landscape which, because it's desert, has not been overbuilt," she said in an interview.

Khaled Saad, department manager for prehistory at Egypt's Supreme Council for Anquities (SCA), said that four years ago the Tourism Ministry decided it wanted to build hotels and tourist attractions on a 20 square km (7.723 sq mile) tract stretching 10 km along the lake's northern shoreline.

It formed a committee to approve designating the land for development that included Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, Tourism Minister Zoheir Garranah, Maghrabi and other officials, Saad said.

In December, the Tourism Development Authority (TDA), which is under the Tourism Ministry, awarded Amer Group the land under a 99-year concession, charging $28,000 in the first year, rising to an annual $92,000 in the fourth to 10th years.

Maghrabi said in early January that the SCA had brought in archaeologists to survey the area before the project went ahead.

"It has been completely cleared by the department of antiquities. We made sure of that," Maghrabi told Reuters at the time. "This project was approved several years ago but no progress was going to be made until the department of antiquities finished their work. And they did finish their work."

MORE RESEARCH "CRUCIAL"

But Hawass of the antiquities council said the work was still ongoing and he was now demanding a fresh assessment.

"Two weeks ago I asked Khaled Saad to come to me with a report to tell me as an archaeologist what he thinks. And now I asked him that we will appoint a large committee of archaeologists to decide the future of the land," Hawass said.

Saad said the survey mentioned by Maghrabi took place between March 2009 and October 2010 and was designed to see if there were antiquities on the site.

"I proved that there were," he said.

The site holds a wealth of prehistoric remains from mid-Mesolithic period 200,000 years ago to the Pharaonic period and later, said Saad.

They also found the remains of 24 ancient whales that swam in the region's waters 42 million years ago, including one belonging to an entirely new species.

Weindrich said further research in the area is crucial to cast light on the origins of Egyptian civilization.

She said agriculture probably arrived late in Egypt because the technology in use elsewhere in the Near East did not fit with the climate, at least until the short period of rainfall in the Neolithic period.

"We have a big research project going on looking at the climate change in that period," she said.

The Neolithic farming community that appeared around six millennia ago had little material to build with and left no sign of permanent buildings or structures, she said.

"They probably lived in some sort of reed matting huts. But what we do see is a whole pattern on the surface of fireplaces for different purposes -- to make pottery, for the fish, to roast their meat. From that pattern we're trying to understand their activities," Wendrich said.

As the moisture disappeared, the desert winds blew away most of the topsoil. Stone tools, pottery and bones once held in soil a meter deep were now concentrated in a thin surface layer.

"There's a howling wind coming from the north, which means the sand blows away, but the heavy things don't," Wendrich said.

"It's great because we can see it, but it's not so great because if you remove the top centimeter, it's gone forever. That's the precarious situation we're dealing with at the moment."

Shortly after the Neolithic period, irrigation began spreading along the Nile Valley.

"By that time, people were looking at different ways for continuing what they by then they were used to doing for a number of centuries," said Wendrich.

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

And...More Evidence of the Spread of Ancient Agriculture

(See prior posts - I seem to be on a "theme" tonight :))

Ancient farmers swiftly spread westward
Agricultural villages appeared in Croatia nearly 8,000 years ago
By Bruce Bower
Web edition : Friday, January 7th, 2011


Discoveries at two prehistoric farming villages in southern
Croatia, including ceramic bowls and a partial female statuette,
 shown above, reflect a sophisticated culture of plant
 cultivation and animal herding much like that still practiced
 in the region today.  Credit:  A. Moore.

Croatia does not have a reputation as a hotbed of ancient agriculture. But new excavations, described January 7 in San Antonio at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, unveil a Mediterranean Sea–hugging strip of southern Croatia as a hub for early farmers who spread their sedentary lifestyle from the Middle East into Europe.

Farming villages sprouted swiftly in this coastal region, called Dalmatia, nearly 8,000 years ago, apparently with the arrival of Middle Easterners already adept at growing crops and herding animals, says archaeologist Andrew Moore of Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

Moore codirects an international research team, with archaeologist Marko Mendušic of Croatia’s Ministry of Culture in Šibenik, that has uncovered evidence of intensive farming at Pokrovnik and Danilo Bitinj, two Neolithic settlements in Dalmatia. Plant cultivation and animal raising started almost 8,000 years ago at Pokrovnik and lasted for close to a millennium, according to radiocarbon dating of charred seeds and bones from a series of occupation layers. Comparable practices at Danilo Bitinj lasted from about 7,300 to 6,800 years ago.

“Farming came to Dalmatia abruptly, spread rapidly and took hold immediately,” Moore says.

Other evidence supports a fast spread of sophisticated farming methods from the Middle East into Europe (SN: 2/5/05, p. 88), remarks Harvard University archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef. Farming villages in western Greece date to about 9,000 years ago, he notes. Middle Eastern farmers exploited a wide array of domesticated plants and animals by 10,500 years ago, setting the stage for a westward migration, Bar-Yosef says.

Other researchers began excavating Pokrovnik and Danilo Bitinj more than 40 years ago. Only Moore and his colleagues dug deep enough to uncover signs of intensive farming.

Their discoveries support the idea that agricultural newcomers to southern Europe built villages without encountering local nomadic groups, Moore asserts. Earlier excavations at Neolithic sites in Germany and France raise the possibility that hunter-gatherers clashed with incoming villagers in northern Europe, he notes.

Surprisingly, Pokrovnik and Danilo Bitinj residents grew the same plants and raised the same animals, in the same proportions, as today’s Dalmatian farmers do, Moore says. Excavated seeds and plant parts show that ancient villagers grew nine different domestic plants — including emmer, oats and lentils — and gathered blackberries and other wild fruits.

Animal bones found at the two villages indicate that residents primarily herded sheep and goats, along with some cattle and a small number of pigs.

Diverse food sources provided a hedge against regional fluctuations in rainfall and growing seasons, according to Moore. “This is an astonishing demonstration of agricultural continuity from the Neolithic to present times,” he says.

Aside from farming, Neolithic villagers in Dalmatia were “oriented toward the sea, and enjoyed extensive long-distance contacts,” Moore adds. Chemical analyses of obsidian chunks found at Pokrovnik and Danilo Bitinj, directed by archaeologist Robert Tykot of the University of South Florida in Tampa, trace most of them to Lipari, an island off Sicily’s north coast.

Shapes and styles of pottery from the ancient Dalmatian villages changed dramatically several times during the Neolithic. Moore’s team can’t explain why these shifts occurred while the farming economy remained the same.

Other than three children found in separate graves, the researchers have unearthed no human skeletons at Pokrovnik and Danilo Bitinj.

Confirmed Evidence of Oldest Yet Evidence of Wine Making

Very interesting.  The article is long so I will not put it here entirely, only some excerpts:

From UCLA
Chemical analysis confirms discovery of oldest wine-making equipment ever found
UCLA scientists use new scientific method to verify vintage 4100 B.C. wine
By Meg Sullivan January 10, 2011 Category: Research

Analysis by a UCLA-led team of scientists has confirmed the discovery of the oldest complete wine production facility ever found, including grape seeds, withered grape vines, remains of pressed grapes, a rudimentary wine press, a clay vat apparently used for fermentation, wine-soaked potsherds, and even a cup and drinking bowl.

The facility, which dates back to roughly 4100 B.C. — 1,000 years before the earliest comparable find — was unearthed by a team of archaeologists from Armenia, the United States and Ireland in the same mysterious Armenian cave complex where an ancient leather shoe was found, a discovery that was announced last summer.

Cave outside Armenian village

The discovery in 2007 of what appeared to be ancient grape seeds inspired the team to begin excavating Areni-1, a cave complex located in a canyon where the Little Caucasus mountains approach the northern end of the Zagros mountain range, near Armenia's southern border with Iran. The cave is outside a tiny Armenian village still known for its wine-making activities.

Radiocarbon analysis by researchers at UC Irvine and Oxford University has dated the installation and associated artifacts to between 4100 B.C. and 4000 B.C., or the Late Chalcolithic Period, also known as the Copper Age in recognition of the technological advances that paved the way for metal to replace stone tools.

Archaeologists found one shallow basin made of pressed clay measuring about 3 feet by 3-and-a-half feet. Surrounded by a thick rim that would have contained juices, and positioned so as to drain into the deep vat, the basin appears to have served as a wine press. Similarly structured wine-pressing devices were in use as recently as the 19th century throughout the Mediterranean and the Caucasus, Areshian said. No evidence was found of an apparatus to smash the grapes against the wine press, but the absence does not trouble the archaeologists.

"People obviously were stomping the grapes with their feet, just the way it was done all over the Mediterranean and the way it was originally done in California," Areshian said.

All around and on top of the wine press archaeologists found handfuls of grape seeds, remains of pressed grapes and grape must, and dozens of desiccated vines. After examining the seeds, paleobotanists from three separate institutions determined the species to be Vitis vinifera vinifera, the domesticated variety of grape still used to make wine.

The team also unearthed one cylindrical cup made of some kind of animal horn and one complete drinking bowl of clay, as well as many bowl fragments.

The closest comparable collection of remains was found in the late 1980s by German archaeologists in the tomb of the ancient Egyptian king Scorpion I, the researchers said. Dating to around 3150 B.C., that find consisted of grape seeds, grape skins, dried pulp and imported ceramic jars covered inside with a yellow residue chemically consistent with wine.

After the Areni-1 discovery, the next earliest example of an actual wine press is two and a half millennia younger: Two plaster basins that appear to have been used to press grapes between 1650 B.C. and 1550 B.C. were excavated in what is now Israel's West Bank in 1963.

Over the years, archaeologists have claimed to find evidence of wine dating as far back as 6000 B.C.–5500 B.C. And references to the art and craft of wringing an inebriant from grapes appear in all kinds of ancient settings. After Noah's Ark landed on Mount Ararat, for instance, the Bible says he planted a vineyard, harvested grapes, produced wine and got drunk. Ancient Egyptian murals depict details of wine-making. Whatever form it takes, early evidence of wine production provides a window into a key transition in human development, scientists say.

"Deliberate fermentation of carbohydrates into alcohol has been suggested as a possible factor that prompted the domestication of wild plants and the development of ceramic technology," said Barnard, who teaches in the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.

Ahem (cough cough) - please notice the location of Areni on the map.  It is in the region anciently known as Urartu and the land of the "mountains of Ararat" as referred to in the Bible. You will be familiar with the old fable (so we're told) from the Bible about Noah's ark landing "on the mountains of Ararat" and he, his family, and the animals he saved on the ark with him disembarked.  As the article goes on to explain, Noah planted a vineyard, in due time made some wine, and got drunk.  After living through an experience like the great flood, hell yes I'd get drunk, too! 

Perhaps continued investigations in the area will uncover even older evidence of wine production.  As I understand it, evidence of "agriculture" - that is, evidence of use of domesticated crops, dates back about 9,000 years ago (to c. 7,000 BCE) and not too far away from those "mountains of Ararat."  Hmmm....  just saying.

"Got Milk?"

Take a look at this map:

Graphic: Expansion of crop cultivation and dairy farming during the Neolithic period.

Now I know nobody takes me seriously when I've said that chess probably came off the Ark with Noah and family -- but really, is it entirely coincidence that the area where the goat, pig, sheep and cow were domesticated is so close to the "mountains of Ararat" just a bit further to the northeast?  Hmmm...

The article at Der Spiegel - it turned me off.  The author makes a lot of assumptions and value judgments (for instance, calling hunter-gatherers in Europe "backward" and the farmers of the "middle east" "advanced.")  Thing is, by the time these farmers finally got to Europe, they hadn't been "from" the middle east" for at least a couple of thousand years.  LOL!  Well, check it out for yourself and see what you think:

10/15/2010
Neolithic Immigration
How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe
By Matthias Schulz

Cucumbers Originated Not In Africa But In the Eastern Himalayas!

I am a long-time cucumber lover.  I can make an entire meal out of a couple of large cukes.  My favorite recipe is dill cucumbers, thinly sliced, soaked in a mixture of sour cream and mayonaise with fresh chopped dill.  Yum!  Nothing takes the heat of the day away like cold fresh cucumber, simply sliced and lightly dressed with salt and some black pepper!  I also make an excellent cucumber sandwich -- I won an award with it for best hors d'ouerves during our annual Christmas Cooking Contest!  I'm not much of a veggy eater, but any platter that holds cucumbers at a party is promptly raided by yours truly :)

I can say confidently that I've never turned my mind to the origins of the cucumber.  If asked, I might have guessed South America.  But the eastern Himalayas!  Wow!  This just fascinates me.  Who knew?  I'd love to see a Burt Wolf show on this!

From physorg.com
Where the wild veggies are: Cultivated cucumber and melon originated in Asia and Australia
July 20, 2010

Sites of origin and regions of domestication of many of our most important cultivated plants are still unknown. The botanical genus Cucumis, to which both the cucumber (Cucumis sativus) and the honeydew melon (C. melo) belong, was long thought to have originated and diversified in Africa, because many wild species of Cucumis are found there.

"A molecular genetic analysis has now shown that the wild populations that gave rise to melons and cucumbers originated in Asia", says LMU botanist Professor Susanne Renner. "In addition, we have found that 25 related species which have never been formally described are found in Asia, Australia and regions around the Indian Ocean." Future genetic studies on C. sativus and its wild relatives should therefore focus on Asia and Australia. The new results are important because the garden cucumber is one of the most widely cultivated vegetable crops, and the species is among the few flowering plants whose genomes have been fully sequenced.

According to Renner, "Our study would not have been possible without the resources of the Munich herbarium and Botanical Garden. A large fraction of the plants we have been able to sequence was collected in India, Vietnam and Australia during the 19th century, and most were then forgotten in herbaria, that is, collections of dried plant specimens. Many of these come from locations that no longer have natural vegetation, for example, because they were collected at sites that now lie in built-up areas of cities like Hanoi." (PNAS online, July 2010)

The family Cucurbitaceae includes crop plants, such cucumbers, melons, loofah, and pumpkins. In terms of its economic importance, the cucumber is among the top ten crop plants cultivated worldwide, and the related honeydew melon is also of considerable agronomic significance. Species that belong to the genus Cucumis are also popular with botanical researchers. Indeed, the domestic cucumber was the seventh species of flowering plant to have its genome sequenced completely, being preceded by such agricultural heavyweights as rice and grapevine. Over the past 10 years, thousands of scientific papers on the biology of cucumbers and melons have appeared.

Many of these studies have used these species as model systems to investigate the mechanism of sex determination during floral development. The question of the genetic origins of the genus Cucumis, on the other hand, has received comparatively little attention (the business about the Romans cultivating cucumber is wrong; I can send you a paper on this topic if you are interested). The general consensus among botanists has been that the melon originated in Africa, because putative wild ancestors of the cultivated variety had been identified there. It now turns out that none of these forms is ancestral to the melons we find in our markets and shops.

"We analyzed specific segments of the genetic material from herbarium specimens of more than 100 Cucumis species. The samples we used had been collected at various locations in Africa, Australia and Asia", reports Patrizia Sebastian, who is the first author on the new study. "It turned out that the closest living wild relative of the cultivated melon is a native of Australia. The two lines diverged about 3 million years ago, and they last shared a common ancestor with their more distant relatives in Asia and Australia about 10 million years ago." The total number of Cucumis species found in Asia and Australia is now around 25, and they branched off from their African relatives some 12 million years ago.

Nine of the 25 species were identified for the first time in the new study. Renner and her colleagues are preparing formal systematic descriptions of the new species for a specialized journal. Taken together, the results argue that the common ancestor of cucumber and melon originated on the continent of Asia. Possible ancestral populations from which the domesticated forms derive have been localized in the Himalayas. The genetic diversity of the varieties of C. melo that occur in India and China is particularly striking. "Our data also prove that the closest living relative of our garden cucumber is the species C. hystrix, which is found in the Eastern Himalayas", says Renner. "Future investigations of the phylogeny of Cucumis should therefore focus on Asia and Australia."

The new findings once again emphasize the great significance for modern botanical research of the herbarium materials that have been assembled over centuries and are now held in institutions like herbarium of the Bavarian Natural History Collections and the LMU's own herbarium. "Many of the plants we examined in this study were collected in the course of the 19th century, and most were then ignored and forgotten", says Renner, who is Director of these herbaria and the Munich Botanic Garden. "In many ways, this material represents an irreplaceable treasure, because the habitats in which much of it was collected no longer exist. Cucumis debilis, for instance, no longer grows at the location from which it was last collected in 1931. The site is now a suburb of Hanoi."

More information: Cucumber (Cucumis sativus) and melon (C. melo) have numerous wild relatives in Asia and Australia, and the sister species of melon is from Australia, Patrizia Sebastian, Hanno Schaefer, Ian R. H. Telford, and Susanne S. Renner, PNAS online, week of July 19 2010.

Provided by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

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.

Ancient Agriculture: The Migration of Millet

Here is an interesting article that says millet actually spread from ancient China to eastern Europe some 9,000 years ago. China's millet spread to Europe 7,000 years ago 13:37, May 14, 2009 Millet was brought into Europe from China more than 7,000 years ago, archaeologists from the University of Cambridge in the UK stated in a thesis published by US journal "Science" on May 8. The report, entitled "Origins of Agriculture in East Asia," was coauthored by Martin Jones, a professor of archaeology at the University of Cambridge and his Chinese student Liu Xinyi. The study said that charred millet seeds found in the Neolithic farming remains in Northeast China indicated that locals had planted millet as early as 8,000 years ago. Millet was gradually introduced to Europe during the next millennium. This research result shows that millet crops were first cultivated in China before being introduced to the West. By People's Daily Online http://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/html/2009-05/14/content_252616.htm

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I think we still don't know a great deal about the rise of agriculture and/or how it spread. I do not think that we can discount China as a source for such things as the brewing of beers and the invention of wine. I believe that not enough attention has been paid to a very old trade coridor that linked parts of northwest China around the Tarim Basin to civilizations further west. Whisps of evidence exist that attest to a very old linkage, possibly as old as late-Naqada/Dynasty I Egypt. Unfortunately, money is tighter than ever when it comes to archaeological explorations of areas other than certain popular hot spots and/or hot topics (like the so-called tomb of Cleopatra and Marc Antony, oh please). Sigh.