Tuesday, June 20, 2006

No news!

Just a quick note to say that I'm not being lazy, but I really have been unable to find any Egyptology news to report today!

So, instead, this is off-topic, but in the absence of anything else, and just for those of you who are interested in the origins of agriculture, there's quite a nice Near Eastern prehistoric find reported from Gilgal (near Jericho) this week. 11,000 year old wild oat and wild barley grains have been found, which researchers Weiss, Kislev and Hartmann (from Bar-Ilan University) argue are the first signs of deliberate cultivation in the area:
11,000 year old grain shakes up beliefs on beginnings of agriculture
http://tinyurl.com/r5vr7 (Jerusalem Post)
"Until now, the general assumption has been that agriculture was begun by a single line of human efforts in one specific area. But the BIU researchers found a much more complicated effort undertaken by different human populations in different regions, drawing a completely new picture of the origins of agriculture.
Agriculture, the BIU researchers suggest, originated through human manipulations of wild plants - sometimes involving the same species - that took place in various spatially and temporally distinct communities. Moreover, some of these occasions were found to be much earlier than previously thought possible."
See the above article for the rest of the summary of the findings. It was derived from the magazine Science - for access to Science online (subscription or pay per view), go to:

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