It is a familiar tale: when humans started farming, their lifestyles changed radically and forever. People stopped foraging, and had a narrower, nutritionally poorer diet. But new evidence suggests we may need to rethink this story.
Farming arose in many places, but the “Fertile Crescent”, an area that today includes parts of Egypt, Iraq and other countries, was one of the first. Many archaeologists assume that there was a big shift in what people there ate when they became farmers 12,000 years ago. For thousands of years, they had gathered and eaten a wide range of plants, whereas the early farmers mostly grew and ate flax, barley, chickpeas and einkorn.
This assumption hadn’t been rigorously tested, say Michael Wallace and Glynis Jones at the University of Sheffield, UK.
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So they examined archaeological evidence from 75 sites across the Fertile Crescent, all between about 7000 and 14,000 years old.
Sifting through this for clues to ancient diets, the team found that hunter-gatherers who lived in the area before farming may have eaten a narrower diet than we assumed.
At sites occupied by these pre‑farmers, only 13 plant types – including winter wild oats, sea clubrush and plants from the cabbage family – were present in high enough amounts to suggest that they were definitely collected for food. What’s more, five of these 13 – and dozens of other wild plants – still appear to have been eaten by farmers 8000 years ago, long after the farming revolution (Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, ).
This study shows that agricultural communities continued to eat wild plants, says Amaia Arranz Otaegui at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Earlier this year, her team discovered that some of the last hunter-gatherer communities in the Fertile Crescent baked bread, a foodstuff once assumed to have been invented by farmers.
Together, these findings suggest the switch from hunter-gatherer to farmer wasn’t as drastic as we thought.
This might alter our current explanations for why everyone in the area ultimately became farmers, says Jones. It was thought that a changing environment made wild foods less abundant, forcing hunter-gatherers to begin growing crops developed by the first farmers. But it now looks like farmers continued to forage wild plants, suggesting these were still readily available.
Instead, wild resources may have been so plentiful that most hunter-gatherers across the region could afford to stop wandering, settle down and experiment with farming while still enjoying ample access to their pre-agricultural larder. Once the process began, says Jones, there might have been a region-wide coevolution of plants and people: several of the plants became crops, and all of the people became farmers.
This article appeared in print under the headline “First farmers kept wild fare on menu”
