Cooked grain flour has been observed in Italy over 30k years ago, no information on the plants it came from.
Possibly indicating that the end of the last glaciation rather than new invention drove the more or less simultaneous large-scale agricultural transitions that occurred all across the old and new world ~10k years ago.
Aaaaand I just saw a talk in which researchers found what look like barley starch grains in 150k year old Neanderthal dental plaque. Probably from wild-grain porridge.
I’ve managed to find someone overlaying the ice core records of the last few interglacials for their own purposes, and although I think this diagram is poorly calibrated in terms of absolute temperature I think it is a reasonable diagram for comparing stability:
It certainly looks to a first glance like our interglacial is significantly FLATTER in terms of average temperatures (in the particular place in Antarctica that this core was taken) than those of the last 500,000 years. The ~23k year age of the reported seeds falls in the middle of the flattish bit of the red line before the rise at the start of the interglacial.
Interesting question if there is a hysteresis to agriculture.
Worth noting:
Rudimentary grain cultivation has been pushed back at least 23k years ago, well into the last glacial maximum and probably older: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422
Cooked grain flour has been observed in Italy over 30k years ago, no information on the plants it came from.
Possibly indicating that the end of the last glaciation rather than new invention drove the more or less simultaneous large-scale agricultural transitions that occurred all across the old and new world ~10k years ago.
Interesting.
Aaaaand I just saw a talk in which researchers found what look like barley starch grains in 150k year old Neanderthal dental plaque. Probably from wild-grain porridge.
Potentially of interest:
https://heteromeles.com/2015/07/29/that-brief-window/
Thanks, fascinating!
I’ve managed to find someone overlaying the ice core records of the last few interglacials for their own purposes, and although I think this diagram is poorly calibrated in terms of absolute temperature I think it is a reasonable diagram for comparing stability:
https://oz4caster.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/interglacial-warm-period-comparison.gif?w=750&h=532
It certainly looks to a first glance like our interglacial is significantly FLATTER in terms of average temperatures (in the particular place in Antarctica that this core was taken) than those of the last 500,000 years. The ~23k year age of the reported seeds falls in the middle of the flattish bit of the red line before the rise at the start of the interglacial.
Interesting question if there is a hysteresis to agriculture.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748