The Agricultural "Revolution" : Its Effect on Human Diet in Prehistoric Iran and Israel

Abstract

The reason that people accepted the responsibility of agriculture is still a subject of controversy. Most explanations include the inherent assumption that a change occurred in the subsistence base. This study investigated the dietary changes that accompanied the development of agriculture in the Middle East. Human and faunal bone samples were taken from three Epipaleolithic period levels at Kebara and el-Wad in the Levant and two Neolithic period sites (Ganj Dareh and Hajji Firuz) in Iran. The proportion of meat to vegetable materials in the diet was estimated by means of trace element analysis for strontium levels in bone. The trace element results from the Levantine sites indicate that human diet changed to include more plant products long before the development of agriculture. The results from the two Iranian sites indicate that the human diet contained relatively high amounts of meat in addition to cultivated plants. Considered together, the results suggest that agriculture did not provide a new food source, but rather, was an economic change which enabled human populations to continue, with increased control and reliability, subsistence systems that had been developed previously.