STATES CHRONICLE – New archaeological findings are showing that previous theories in regards to how agriculture developed are wrong. The theories believed that agriculture had been discovered by a single Stone Age tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Middle East. The tribe expanded and its members migrated to Europe, Asia, and Africa, where they shared the knowledge.

• The new findings suggest that agriculture had been in fact developed by several tribes much earlier than initially thought;
• The tribes may have exchanged their different agricultural knowledge and techniques;
• The findings are considered to have a huge impact on the current perception of ancient history.

Archaeological Agriculture

Archaeologists uncovered a new discovery in a cave in the Zagros Mountains, near Islamabad in Iran. They have unearthed ancient human remains which do not fit the type of the local population of that time entirely.

Scientists from the United States, Europe, and Iran analyzed the remains. After examining the DNA, the scientists got to the conclusion that they were looking at bone fragments that were nine or ten thousand years old. They belonged to a man who had black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin.

Previously, archaeologists found several other sets of remains in the area of the Zagros Mountains. Scientists used all the found genomes in order to recreate an image of the population who lived so close near the current Iranian capital.

The ten thousand years old tribe resembled people who currently lives in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Zoroastrian religious community in Iran also has several features that could date back to the ancient genomes.

Scientists were also able to piece together the man’s main diet. They were surprised to find out that the man had partly lived off of cereals. The man could have had access to cereal only by being part of a community who practiced agriculture and cultivated crops.

Before the find, scientists believed that there had only been one tribe of hunter-gatherers who developed agriculture. This tribe would have been located in the geographical areas partly overlapping Greece and Turkey.

Scientists compared the genomes of the people of the Zagros Mountains with the genomes of the tribe initially believed to have been the only developers of agriculture. The results clearly identified two different but neighboring peoples.

Archaeologists calculated that the neighboring tribes had potentially been part of the same population more than 50 thousand years, greatly pre-dating the initial development of agriculture.

Scientists now believe that separate agriculture techniques and procedures could have been developed by different communities and that the information was shared among them.

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia.