Whenever we imagine the transition of our ancient ancestors from foraging to farming, we typically start with the seeds. In fact, the traditional theory says the first cultivation of crops kept people to the terrain of the Fertile Crescent thousands of years prior to the first attempts at the cultivation of animals.
And yet, a new paper published in PLOS ONE challenges the theory that crop cultivation came first and animal cultivation came second. The paper proposes that the ancient foragers at the Abu Hureyra archaeological site in Syria started tending to animals approximately 12,800 to 12,300 years ago, at around the same time that they picked up their plows.
Ancient people occupied the archaeological site of Abu Hureyra for thousands of years, all throughout their transition from foraging for food to farming. And though archaeologists have sifted through the soil at the site for years, there’s still a lot ...
