Ohalo II

The Neolithic officially began 12,000 years ago; however, there is earlier evidence of agriculture. When the level of Lake Galilee fell by 10 ft during a recent drought, it revealed the remains of the Ohalo II village (Figure 13‑1) and the stone foundations of little brush huts.[1] Scientists found thousands of agricultural and other seeds in one of the huts of this 23,000-year-old village at the northern end of the Jordan Valley. The hut had a grinding stone on which someone had crushed seeds in the process of food preparation. Archaeologists do not know why the villagers abandoned the location, but a fire destroyed the huts. Did some other group attack and burn the village? The next evidence of agriculture is almost 10,000 years later. Even though it was at approximately the same location, but at the southern end of the Jordan Valley, it seems that the people of Ohalo II and their agricultural lifestyle perished, and 10,000 years passed by before agriculture began again. This repeat of agricultural development in the same area is evidence that environmental and biological differences in native populations played a key role in the domestication of crops and animals in certain locations in the world and not others. It just so happened that some people happened to be at the right place at the right time, and they took advantage of the circumstances with which they were presented. The same concept applies to modern technologies and ideas with some people able to take advantage of circumstances with which they are presented.

Ohalo II was located at the southern end of the Sea of Galilee, just north of the outlet to the Jordan River (Figure 13‑3). Ohalo II was a flat area near the water, with rich soil and plentiful plants and animals. Ohalo II had plentiful water, edible plants. They were the first known people to have bedding (beds). [2] The structure of one male skeleton from Ohalo II indicates that he threw and thrust spears at game or fish. The bones found around the camp indicates that there were three nearby habitats: “a local saline habitat, a nearby lakeshore habitat, and a Mediterranean open park-like forest, probably on the slopes surrounding the Sea of Galilee basin.” There were bones of fallow deer, fox, hare, waterfowl, and small fish at the site.

Researchers excavated one of the six huts in the village and found 90,000 seeds, including oats, barley, and millet, with a concentration of seeds lying around a grinding stone. They think that the Ohalo II community was already domesticating, sowing, and harvesting the cereals. Wheat plants are generally bred so that a scar forms on ears of cereals and causes the ears to remain together during harvest, and the Ohallo II wheat plants had these scars. [3] In contrast, wild seeds break off easily from wild wheat ears in order to facilitate seed dispersal by wind in the environment. Researchers also found weeds at Ohalo II, which is another reason to believe that the people at Ohalo II practiced agriculture. Invasive plants that naturally thrive in the agricultural habitat become agricultural weeds as they adapt to the agricultural environment by natural selection.

Researchers found sickles for harvesting wild or domesticated wheat (Figure 14‑4). There were two types. Flint knives were held by hand, and sharp inserts were inserted into handles.[4]

References

[1] Dani Nadel and Ella Werker (1999). The oldest ever brush hut plant remains from Ohalo II, Jordan Valley, Israel (19,000 BP). Antiquity, 73, pp 755-764. doi:10.1017/S0003598X00065509.

[2] Nadel D, Weiss E, Simchoni O, Tsatskin A, Danin A, Kislev M. Stone Age hut in Israel yields world’s oldest evidence of bedding. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2004;101(17):6821-6826. doi:10.1073/pnas.0308557101.

[3] Daily Mail, 2015. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3172081/Did-humans-start-farming-11-THOUSAND-years-earlier-thought-Stone-sickles-suggest-cultivating-crops-23-000-years-ago.html#ixzz42pS7akcV

[4] Groman-Yaroslavski, Iris, Ehud Weiss, and Dani Nadel. "Composite sickles and cereal harvesting methods at 23,000-years-old Ohalo II, Israel." PloS one 11, no. 11 (2016): e0167151.

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Ohalo II excavation site on shore of Lake Galilee. Credit: Iris Groman-Yaroslavski , Ehud Weiss, Dani Nadel - The Near-Eastern Roots of the Neolithic in South Asia "From PLOS ONE, an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.