Wild Cereals Research Articles

Saharan prehistoric basketry. Archaeological and archaeobotanical analysis of the early-middle Holocene assemblage from Takarkori (Acacus Mts., SW Libya)

The paper presents the large set of basketry and other worked fibre artefacts constituting the perishable artefacts assemblage from the Takarkori rock shelter. This site is located in southwestern Libya, central Sahara. Its well-preserved Holocene stratigraphy testifies to human occupations by foraging groups (Late Acacus culture; ca. 9000–7400 uncal years bp; ca. 8300–6100 BCE) and herders (Pastoral cultures; ca. 7400–4500 uncal years bp; ca. 6400–3000 BCE).The basketry collection includes 91 desiccated items. They have been divided into two distinct groups: basketry constructions and basketry elements (b-items: 53 fragments); ropes and other elements in the broad sense (r-items: 38 fragments). Stems were mostly used to make the b-items, while a fairly diversified set of materials was used for ropes and other elements. In a few cases, mixed animal and plant materials were also employed. SEM analyses showed some diagnostic characteristics such as epidermal stomata, phytoliths, hairs and vessels indicating monocotyledons. Many items were identified as Panicoideae, likely of the Setaria and Panicum types. Therefore, the main wild cereals collected for food and transported into the site also seem to have been the main plants used to make basketry. The only wooden item was attributed to Vitex. The majority of the basketry is made using the twined technique.Basketry remains were more common during the Late Acacus occupation of the site, possibly associated with wild cereal processing and storage, reinforcing the idea of a re-organization of food security towards a delayed use of resources. The basketry material could be interpreted as remains of large and open baskets to collect and store seeds. Decreasing availability of wild cereals, changes in resource exploitation and the nomadic mobility pattern may explain why a smaller number of basketry items was found in layers connected to the Pastoral phases of occupation.

Food shortage in Zimbabwe: Can wild cereal grains be an alternative source of nutrition?

Cereals are used as staple food in most countries all over the world including Zimbabwe. Unfortunately, poor rainfall patterns have hampered the production of traditional cereals like maize and wheat leading to poverty especially in third world countries. Five wild cereal grains namely; Amaranthus hybridus, Brachiaria brizantha, Panicum maximum, Rottiboellea cochinchinensis and Sorghum arundinaceum were studied to determine their nutritional value because of their drought tolerance. Two domesticated cereals were used for comparison. The macro nutrients determined were proteins, carbohydrates, fats and minerals. Amaranthus hybridus, a wild cereal, had the highest protein and fat content of 21.44% and 11.50% respectively, compared to all the other cereal grains. Brachiaria brizantha had the highest fibre content of 30.34% while the red variety of Sorghum bicolor had the least fibre content of 2.51%. Phosphorus was detected in all the cereal grains studied. Calcium was detected in all the cereal grains except in red variety of Sorghum bicolor. The nutritional composition of the cereal grains makes them potential alternative food sources.

Searching for the origins of arable weeds in the Near East

This short note adds to earlier attempts at identifying arable weeds on late Pleistocene/early Holocene sites in the Near East. Nineteen potential arable weed taxa that have no known use were selected. The occurrence of these taxa at sites with morphologically wild cereals was compared to sites with morphologically domestic cereals. The presumed arable weed taxa were as common on three PPNA (Pre Pottery Neolithic A) sites without domestication as they were on Middle PPNB (Pre Pottery Neolithic B) sites with domestication, which lends support to arguments for pre-domestic cultivation at the former sites. Arable weed taxa were less common at Natufian sites but their presence raises the question of whether they originated in cultivated fields or were the ancestors of weeds gathered accidentally alongside wild cereals in their natural habitat.

Experimental growing of wild pea in Israel and its bearing on Near Eastern plant domestication

The wild progenitors of the Near Eastern legumes have low germination rates mediated by hardseededness. Hence it was argued that cultivation of these wild legumes would probably result in no yield gain. Based on the meagre natural yield of wild lentil and its poor germination, it was suggested that wild Near Eastern grain legumes were unlikely to have been adopted for cultivation unless freely germinating types were available for the incipient farmers. Unlike wild cereals, data from experimental cultivation of wild legumes are lacking. Replicated nurseries of wild pea (Pisum elatius, P. humile and P. fulvum) were sown during 2007-2010 in the Mediterranean district of Israel. To assess the effect of hardseededness on the yield potential, seeds of the wild species were either subjected to scarification (to ensure germination) or left intact, and compared with domesticated controls. Sowing intact wild pea seeds mostly resulted in net yield loss due to poor establishment caused by wild-type low germination rates, while ensuring crop establishment by scarification resulted in net, although modest, yield gain, despite considerable losses due to pod dehiscence. Harvest efficiency of the wild pea plots was significantly higher (2-5 kg seeds h(-1)) compared with foraging efficiency in wild pea populations (ranging from a few grams to 0·6 kg h(-1)). Germination and yield data from 'cultivation' of wild pea suggest that Near Eastern legumes are unlikely to have been domesticated via a protracted process. Put differently, the agronomic implications of the hardseededness of wild legumes are incompatible with a millennia-long scenario of unconscious selection processes leading to 'full' domestication. This is because net yield loss in cultivation attempts is most likely to have resulted in abandonment of the respective species within a short time frame, rather than perpetual unprofitable cultivation for several centuries or millennia.

Evolution Under Environmental Stress at Macro- and Microscales

Environmental stress has played a major role in the evolution of living organisms (Hoffman AA, Parsons PA. 1991. Evolutionary genetics and environmental stress. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Parsons PA. 2005. Environments and evolution: interactions between stress, resource inadequacy, and energetic efficiency. Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 80:589–610). This is reflected by the massive and background extinctions in evolutionary time (Nevo E. 1995a. Evolution and extinction. Encyclopedia of Environmental Biology. New York: Academic Press, Inc. 1:717–745). The interaction between organism and environment is central in evolution. Extinction ensues when organisms fail to change and adapt to the constantly altering abiotic and biotic stressful environmental changes as documented in the fossil record. Extreme environmental stress causes extinction but also leads to evolutionary change and the origination of new species adapted to new environments. I will discuss a few of these global, regional, and local stresses based primarily on my own research programs. These examples will include the 1) global regional and local experiment of subterranean mammals; 2) regional experiment of fungal life in the Dead Sea; 3) evolution of wild cereals; 4) “Evolution Canyon”; 5) human brain evolution, and 6) global warming.

Reassessing the evidence for the cultivation of wild crops during the Younger Dryas at Tell Abu Hureyra, Syria

The episodic periods of climate change between the end of the Pleistocene and the Early Holocene had significant effects on vegetation in the Levant. The three Late Epipalaeolithic phases at Tell Abu Hureyra (c. 13·1 kya cal. BP to 12·0 kya cal. BP) span the onset of the Younger Dryas when there was a reversion to cold and dry conditions from the preceding warmer/wetter Bølling-Allerød interstadial. The deterioration of the climate is argued to have caused a recession of Mediterranean woodland from the immediate environs of the site and thus the habitats of many of the edible large-seeded annual plants became less accessible. Changes in the taxonomic composition of the archaeobotanical samples from the three Late Epipalaeolithic phases were interpreted by the original analyst as reflecting diet change in response to a reduction in resource availability, with the inception of cultivation of wild cereals and large-seeded legumes to maintain yields of these high-ranked species. In this reassessment of the data we propose an alternative model and demonstrate that the changes in plant exploitation strategies at Abu Hureyra, which coincide with the onset of the Younger Dryas, can be more parsimoniously interpreted as representing a broadening of the plant diet to compensate for a loss in availability of higher-ranked species.

Evidence for food storage and predomestication granaries 11,000 years ago in the Jordan Valley

Food storage is a vital component in the economic and social package that comprises the Neolithic, contributing to plant domestication, increasingly sedentary lifestyles, and new social organizations. Recent excavations at Dhra' near the Dead Sea in Jordan provide strong evidence for sophisticated, purpose-built granaries in a predomestication context approximately 11,300-11,175 cal B.P., which support recent arguments for the deliberate cultivation of wild cereals at this time. Designed with suspended floors for air circulation and protection from rodents, they are located between residential structures that contain plant-processing instillations. The granaries represent a critical evolutionary shift in the relationship between people and plant foods, which precedes the emergence of domestication and large-scale sedentary communities by at least 1,000 years.

Increased Sedentism in the Central Oases of the Egyptian Western Desert in the Early to Mid-Holocene: Evidence from the Peripheries

Two locations adjacent to the great central oases of the Egyptian Western Desert experienced an unusual period of sedentism in the early to mid-Holocene. Around the Southeast Basin near Dakhleh Oasis and in the Wadi el-Midauwara above Kharga, areas sharing close cultural ties, groups of slab structure sites attest to increased sedentism spanning 2,500 years. Kharga seems to have been settled fairly continuously through the two and a half millennia, but little is known of subsistence practices in this location. Dakhleh experienced two episodes of increased sedentism. Early Holocene Masara groups occupied a well-watered location within a generally dry desert. In the wetter mid-Holocene, Bashendi settlers in large stone-built sites hunted, collected wild cereals, and may have kept herds. As the desert dried after 5300 BC, the settlers switched to a life of mobile forager-herders.

Plant exploitation and ethnopalynological evidence from the Wadi Teshuinat area (Tadrart Acacus, Libyan Sahara)

Pollen analyses of 13 archaeological sites in the Wadi Teshuinat area, in southwestern Fezzan, Libya, were synthesised to explore the potential contribution of palynological investigation to archaeological research in this area. During the Holocene, the sites were occupied by pre-Pastoral (hunter–gatherers) and Pastoral (pastoralists) cultures. Different pollen stratigraphies and floras characterised the diverse sites and the relevant cultural phases. Pollen data were reported by discussing the sites separately, and by combining them to interpret the regional data set. Emphasis was made on the anthropogenic pollen indicators and grasses, including large grass pollen grains (>40 μm), which were considered evidence of plant transport into the site. These were ethnobotanical markers, human-made evidence of plant harvesting by hunter–gatherers, or of animal breeding by pastoralists. The disappearance of some wild cereals was also observed, consistent with increasing climate dryness and land exploitation. Macroremains were used as a parallel tool to better understand plant exploitation in the region.

Experimental harvesting of wild peas in Israel: implications for the origins of Near East farming

Previous evaluations of the potential advantage of farming over foraging have been based on experimental harvesting of wild cereals in Near Eastern ecosystems. The highly successful combination of cereals and legumes, “the Near Eastern crops assemblage”, is considered a natural choice due to the complementary nutritional value of the two crop types. Yet, legumes were rarely referred to in models describing early farming and the transition from foraging to farming. Wild legumes differ from wild cereals in several attributes pertaining to domestication, including population density (patchy vs. dense), growth habit (indeterminate vs. determinate), dispersal units (camouflaged seeds vs. awned spikelets), seed dormancy (90–80% vs. 50%), and year to year establishment (erratic vs. regular). We have analyzed the yield potential of three wild pea species ( Pisum elatius, P. humile, and P. fulvum) in several ecosystems in Israel. All three pea species have patchy distribution patterns and the yield potential of the wild populations is highly variable. A harvest rate of 0.6–610 grams (calculated per collector) of clean dry grain per hour of harvest time was estimated. Among the three species studied the one adopted for domestication appears to be the least productive. This suggests that the potential productivity of wild peas was not the only or even the major consideration for domestication.

Ancient Figs Push Back Origin of Plant Cultivation

ARCHAEOLOGY Scientists seeking to date the origins of agriculture have been following the trail of wheat, barley, and other grains at archaeological sites in the Near East for decades. They recently concluded that cultivation of annual cereal crops started about 10,500 years ago ( Science , 31 March, p. 1886). But a new study suggests that fruit rather than grains may yield the earliest evidence of purposeful planting. On page 1372, a team of Israeli researchers reports the discovery of domesticated figs stored in an ancient house in the Lower Jordan Valley. They painstakingly show that the carbonized figs were a cultivated variety that differed from wild figs. Based on radiocarbon dating of the village, this cultivation occurred about 11,400 years ago, Mordechai E. Kislev, an archaeobotanist at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, and his colleagues conclude. That pushes back the age of the first known cultivated plant by about 1000 years and also indicates that humans must have been experimenting with agriculture on a small scale hundreds of years before that. “This is the oldest evidence for deliberate planting of a food-producing plant, as opposed to just gathering food in the wild,” says archaeologist Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University in Canberra. ![Figure][1] Fruitful find. Mordechai Kislev studies figs for clues about the origins of agriculture. This ancient fig ( inset ), wrapped in gold for imaging, was cultivated 11,400 years ago. CREDITS: ANAT HARTMANN; (INSET) JONATHAN REIF This evidence sat ignored for several decades. Nine dried figs and hundreds of fig drupelets—the pulpy sections of a fruit—were collected in the 1970s and 1980s during an excavation of a pristine house in the Neolithic village of Gilgal in the Lower Jordan Valley, about 12 kilometers north of Jericho. After the Israeli archaeologist who led the excavation died, the figs were forgotten until the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, invited Harvard University archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef and others to study the finds from the excavation. The figs were sent to Kislev, who eventually analyzed them with a graduate student, Anat Hartmann. They realized that the figs were a sterile but soft and edible variety that required human selection and planting to grow. Kislev says humans must have been cultivating figs for hundreds of years, because it would have taken centuries for the wild fruit to have evolved the genetic and morphological changes that resulted in the variety of figs found at Gilgal. This gradual domestication of figs is similar to the speed with which wild cereals were domesticated; cereals crops, first cultivated in southern Turkey and northern Syria 11,500 years ago, are thought to have taken about 1000 years to domesticate from wild grains in the area. Kislev is now asking archaeologists to search for figs in even older excavations to pinpoint when the cultivation of the fruit began. The purposeful planting of figs shows that settlers in the Jordan Valley were auditioning a variety of foods to see what they could grow, says archaeologist Bruce Smith of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The development of early agriculture, he notes, was a slow process that took place on a small scale in different areas, through trial and error with different plants. It would take another 2000 years before humans were such adept farmers that half of their calories came from crops. The discovery of dried cultivated figs, however, makes it clear that 11,000 years ago, more than meat, cereals, and wild nuts and berries were on the menu. “Humans cannot live on steak alone,” says Bar-Yosef. “They wanted condiments and all kinds of things that tasted good.” [1]: pending:yes

The role of wild grasses in subsistence and sedentism: new evidence from the northern Fertile Crescent

Sedentism is usually regarded as a pre-condition for the development of crop husbandry in Southwest Asia and, consequently, sedentary pre-agrarian sites are an important focus of research on the origins of agriculture. It is often assumed that wild grasses were as important for hunter-gatherers as domesticated cereals were for early farmers, and that wild grass exploitation may therefore have had a critical role in enabling sedentism. Results from the analysis of archaeobotanical assemblages from Hallan Çemi, Demirköy, Qermez Dere and M'lefaat, and comparison with those of other sedentary pre-agrarian sites in Southwest Asia, challenge the role often attributed to the exploitation of grasses at this time. Archaeobotanical and ethnographical evidence instead suggests that hunter-gatherers took an opportunistic approach to the resources available and their subsistence strategies were not necessarily centred on grasses and ‘wild cereals’.

Genome evolution of wild cereal diversity and prospects for crop improvement

Genomic and proteomic diversity provide the basis of evolutionary change by natural selection under abiotic and biotic stresses, and the human-driven evolutionary process of domestication by artificial selection. Described here are some of the regional and local genomic and proteomic long-term multidisciplinary studies conducted at the Institute of Evolution, University of Haifa, Israel, during 1975–2005 (see publications athttp://evolution.haifa.ac.il), involving both wild barley,Hordeum spontaneum, the progenitor of cultivated barley and wild emmer sheat,Triticum dicoccoides, the progenitor of modern tetraploid and hexaploid cultivated wheat. Wild cereals harbour large amounts of as yet untapped adaptive genetic resources for crop improvement (resistances against abiotic and biotic stresses, micronutrient metal deficiencies, storage proteins, amylases and photosynthetic yield, among others). The adaptive genomic diversity of wild cereals, including cryptic beneficial alleles at specific quantitative trait loci ofT. dicoccoidesandH. spontaneumis the best genomic resource to be conservedin situandex situfor utilization by classical and modern biotechnologies, to enrich the genetically impoverished and stress-vulnerable food cultivars, advance crop improvement, and thereby increase and optimize world food production in a second genetic green revolution.

How Fast Was Wild Wheat Domesticated?

Prehistoric cultivation of wild wheat in the Fertile Crescent led to the selection of mutants with indehiscent (nonshattering) ears, which evolved into modern domestic wheat. Previous estimates suggested that this transformation was rapid, but our analyses of archaeological plant remains demonstrate that indehiscent domesticates were slow to appear, emerging approximately 9500 years before the present, and that dehiscent (shattering) forms were still common in cultivated fields approximately 7500 years before the present. Slow domestication implies that after cultivation began, wild cereals may have remained unchanged for a long period, supporting claims that agriculture originated in the Near East approximately 10,500 years before the present.

Wild cereals in breeding

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Field evaluation of regression equations to estimate crop yield losses due to weeds

Various regression equations based on weed density alone, or relative time of weed and crop emergence or crop density in addition to weed density have been developed in western Canada to estimate the effects of wild oat (Avena fatua L.) and volunteer cereals on yield loss of field crops, and to advise farmers on the economics of weed control with herbicides. In 1997, 1998, and 1999, several of these equations were evaluated in 9 barley (Hordeum vulgare L.), 9 wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and 11 canola (Brassica napus L.) fields in Alberta. Wild oat was the dominant weed in the barley and wheat fields, and wild oat or volunteer cereals in the canola fields. In barley and wheat, more complex equations based on both weed density and either crop density or relative time of weed and crop emergence were more reliable in estimating yield losses due to wild oat than those based on weed density alone. In canola, an equation based on volunteer barley and canola density provided the most reliable estimates. Under the assumed crop prices and herbicide costs, these equations also resulted in the best estimates of whether or not a herbicide application resulted in a net profit or loss. Herbicide application was rarely economical in barley, but usually economical in wheat and canola reflecting the different market value of the crops. The implementation of the weed economic threshold concept is likely to be more feasible in low-value crops such as feed barley than in higher-value crops such as canola. Key words: Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.), canola (Brassica napus L.), volunteer cereals, weed economic threshold, wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), wild oat (Avena fatua L.)

The distribution, natural habitats and availability of wild cereals in relation to their domestication in the Near East: multiple events, multiple centres

In this article we examine the natural habitats and distribution of the six wild cereals: Triticum urartu (wild urartu wheat), T. boeoticum aegilopoides (single-grained wild einkorn), T. boeoticum thaoudar (two-grained wild einkorn), T. dicoccoides (wild emmer wheat), Secale spp. (wild ryes) and Hordeum spontaneum (wild barley). A comparison of late Pleistocene/early Holocene archaeobotanical assemblages in the Near East with present-day distributions of wild cereals shows a good correlation. The regional variation in the archaeobotanical cereal assemblages and the ensuing domestication provide evidence that different cereal species were domesticated independently in different areas. Some sites were not situated near wild cereal habitats and a few were located outside the limits of distribution, even accounting for moister climatic conditions. I argue here that current models which try to explain the shift to farming have tended to over-emphasize the effect of the Younger Dryas climatic change. First, it would have had only a minor effect on cereal availability. Secondly, agriculture appears to have been established after the Younger Dryas. Thirdly, there is no evidence for a single centre of origin; agriculture arose in widely separated geographic and climatic regions. And fourthly, agriculture depends on stable climatic conditions which were not established until after the Younger Dryas.

Processing of wild cereal grains in the Upper Palaeolithic revealed by starch grain analysis.

Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) and wheat (Triticum monococcum L. and Triticum turgidum L.) were among the principal 'founder crops' of southwest Asian agriculture. Two issues that were central to the cultural transition from foraging to food production are poorly understood. They are the dates at which human groups began to routinely exploit wild varieties of wheat and barley, and when foragers first utilized technologies to pound and grind the hard, fibrous seeds of these and other plants to turn them into easily digestible foodstuffs. Here we report the earliest direct evidence for human processing of grass seeds, including barley and possibly wheat, in the form of starch grains recovered from a ground stone artefact from the Upper Palaeolithic site of Ohalo II in Israel. Associated evidence for an oven-like hearth was also found at this site, suggesting that dough made from grain flour was baked. Our data indicate that routine processing of a selected group of wild cereals, combined with effective methods of cooking ground seeds, were practiced at least 12,000 years before their domestication in southwest Asia.

Impetus for sowing and the beginning of agriculture: Ground collecting of wild cereals

The Agricultural Revolution in Western Asia, which took place some 11,000 years ago, was a turning point in human history [Childe, V. G. (1952) New Light on the Most Ancient East (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London)]. In investigating the cultural processes that could have led from gathering to intentional cultivation, various authors have discussed and tested wild cereal harvesting techniques. Some argue that Near Eastern foragers gathered grains by means of sickle harvesting, uprooting, plucking (hand stripping), or beating into baskets [Hillman, G. C. & Davies, M. S. (1999) in Prehistory of Agriculture: New Experimental and Ethnographic Approaches, ed. Anderson, P. (The Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles), pp. 70-102]. During systematic experiments, we found that archaeobotanical data from regional Neolithic sites support ground collection of grains by early hunter-gatherers. Ground collecting suits the natural shattering of wild species that ripen and drop grains at the beginning of summer. We show that continual collection off the ground from May to October would have provided surplus grains for deliberate sowing in more desirable fields, and facilitate the transition to intentional cultivation. Because ground gathering enabled collectors to observe that fallen seeds are responsible for the growth of new plants in late fall, they became aware of the profitability of sowing their surplus seeds for next year's food. Ground collecting of wild barley and wild wheat may comprise the missing link between seed collecting by hunter-gatherers and cereal harvesting by early farmers.

FOCUS: Estimated Wheat Yields During the Emergence of Agriculture Based on the Carbon Isotope Discrimination of Grains: Evidence from a 10th Millennium BP Site on the Euphrates

The analysis of carbon isotope discrimination (Δ) in crop seeds from archaeological sites may help to assess yield during early agriculture. Wheat was among the first crops to be domesticated in the Near East. Here, a yield model based on Δ in grains from present-day crops of durum wheat (Triticum durum Def.) is developed using a wide range of genotypes, most of which were cultivated in the Eastern Mediterranean basin (Syria). A strong positive linear regression (r2=0·72) between yield on a logarithmic basis and grain Δ was observed. Initial estimates of ancient wheat yields were then obtained by fitting the Δ values of archaeological grains to the above relationship. The yield estimates were subsequently corrected to take into consideration the two main differences between ancient and modern crops not accounted for by the Δ of ancient samples: atmospheric CO2levels and grain/total above-ground biomass ratio. The model was then used to estimate yields of naked wheat (Triticum durum/aestivum) attained at Tell Halula, an early agricultural site, ranging from Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB, c.9550bp calibrated) to Late Neolithic (Pre-Halaf, c.8630bp calibrated). This is the earliest archaeological settlement in the Middle Euphrates region (Rakka Governorate, Syria) at which the cultivation of domesticated naked wheat has been reported. Productivity, calculated from Δ of wheat grains found at this site, was relatively high, with an average (mean±s.d. ) of 1·56±0·28Mg ha−1. Although these yields are well below those attained in this region by present-day wheat crops under irrigation (e.g. 3·83Mg ha−1, mean value for 1987–1996 period at Rakka Governorate), they are higher than those achieved for wheat under the current rainfed conditions of this semi-arid region (1·05Mg ha−1) and suggest natural growing conditions were wetter than those than are prevalent today. In addition, our estimates for Tell Halula suggest that Neolithic agricultural practices may have produced greater yields than those to be expected from stands of wild cereals, which would have favoured the transition from gathering to cultivation.