Naked wheat grain from Koufovouno, southern Greece. Courtesy Amy Bogaard Claims about early agricultural practices and how much grain our ancestors ate are apparently full of… manure. As early as 8,000 years ago, Stone Age farmers across Europe were working their crop lands intensely, irrigating and strategically applying manure, according to new research published in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings also call into question previous estimates of how much protein in the Neolithic human diet was derived from animals rather than plants.
Researchers based their study on the chemical composition of charred cereals and pulses — the edible seeds of legumes — at 13 Neolithic sites spread from Bulgaria to England, dating from 4,400 to almost 8,000 years ago. Where possible, they also analyzed wild vegetation and the bone collagen of both domestic and wild herbivores from some of the sites. The team looked at ...
