Thread by @_AlexWeide_

It is finally out! Our paper presenting a new functional ecological model to analyse agricultural disturbance throughout the Early Neolithic in SW Asia. Why is this super exciting? Here's a thread... 1/x 🌾👩‍🌾🐮
@school_of_arch #archaeobotany #archaeology

nature.com/articles/s4147…

During the Early Neolithic in SW Asia, the oldest agricultural societies globally appear between 12,000-8,000 years ago. They built permanent houses, lived in larger communities, and changed the way they obtained food: they started to farm plants and animals!
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But how did this process unfold? We know that people in the earliest permanent settlements between ca 12,000-10,000 years ago did not have domesticated plants like cereals and legumes but harvested their wild progenitors - e.g. wild emmer and barley.
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A key question is: did these earliest settled communities already cultivate these wild plants or did they still collect them from local grasslands - where they grow until today! This is also crucial as cultivation has huge social implications: labour, e.g. soil tillage...
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Until now we thought - based on an impressive body of archaeological research - that these oldest "villages" already farmed wild cereals and legumes. See e.g. Willcox 2012, who based his arguments on the increasing amounts of arable weed seeds.
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link.springer.com/article/10.100…

The logic: the more seeds of arable weeds, the more likely the cereals/legumes were farmed. The problem: almost all arable weeds also grow naturally in SW Asia, even together with the wild cereals.
This is why we had to take a closer look and surveyed grasslands in Israel...
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We found a large overlap between grassland species and arable weeds in Israel, which makes sense as this is where many Eurasian arable weeds are coming from! This was published last year (and please ask me for pdfs, I can send via email of course!).
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tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

The question then was: how can we distinguish between grasslands and arable fields in archaeobotanical datasets when the arable weeds grow in both? To approach this we focused on one key difference: arable fields are highly disturbed (=tilled) but grasslands are not...
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A method called "plant functional ecology" allowed us to analyse our data with a focus on this ecological difference. We chose plant functional traits related to soil disturbance - and no I won't bother you with any details here - built the model, and hoped for the best...
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And to our delight the model could distinguish between samples from grasslands and arable fields, where the main difference was disturbance due to soil tillage. The arable dataset we used was compiled in Palestine in the 20th century by M. Zohary.
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jstor.org/stable/2003450…

The next step was to apply our "disturbance model" to Early Neolithic archaeobotanical data. We concentrated on sites that were thought to represent early cultivators, such as Jerf el Ahmar in Syria and Netiv Hagdud in Palestine. And to our great surprise...
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...these communities did not harvest their wild cereals from arable fields! They harvested them from habitats that were as little disturbed as unmanaged - even protected - modern grasslands. Which means that these early "villages" were by no means farmers!
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Based on these results we believe that the first steps towards sedentism and village life in SW Asia were supported by the rich and productive grasslands that were widespread in the Early Neolithic - and from which plentiful grain harvests could be obtained for centuries.
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To understand the origins of agriculture we must therefore pay more attention to grassland ecology, and ask how settled communities exploited these habitats for more than a millennium? We believe that the answer to this lies in the biology of the wild cereals themselves...
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Wild cereals like emmer wheat grow fast, can easily outcompete smaller plant species, and therefore dominate grasslands throughout SW Asia (see paper below). The exploitation strategies of early settled communities possibly made use of these traits.
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royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.10…

When we think of a cultivated field, how does it look like? It is dominated by one or more cereal species, and they are accompanied by a weed flora adapted to the agricultural disturbances. Could it be that an arable field is nothing more than a special type of grassland?
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Based on our results, that early settled communities relied on grasslands for >1000 years and only later started to create fields, we think exactly this! Grassland ecology and the behaviour of wild cereals taught people over millennia how to exploit these plants resiliently.
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In short: we see that the origins of agriculture are more a story of ecological collaboration and the co-evolution of humans and plants, rather than a human innovation that led to the control of plants and animals. And in SW Asia this collaboration was born in grasslands...
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...which until today represent one of the most productive ecosystems globally and feeds millions of people around the world. See this article which nicely summarises why we need our grasslands - also to fight climate change: foodnavigator.com/Article/2021/1…
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20/20 The end! 🌺🌻🌼🌾🌾🌾🌸🌼🌺

If you are interested in any of the mentioned articles - and the one published today - please drop me a line and I send pdfs.