The East African Magazine
Date: 24.10.2016
Page 9
Article size: 486 cm2
ColumnCM: 108.0
AVE: 162000.0
TRACING ROOTS OF
THE FIRST FARMERS
Beneath a rocky slope in central
Jordan lie the remains of a 10,000­
year­old village called Ain Ghazal.
Ain Ghazal was one of the first farming
villages to have emerged after the dawn of
agriculture.
Ain Ghazal farmers raised barley, wheat,
chickpeas and lentils. Other villagers
including maybe the people," said Melinda versity College Dublin, and Lazaridis of
A. Zeder, a senior research scientist at the Harvard — recovered genetic material
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural
from 44 sets of remains around the Near
History.
But in recent years, Zeder and other
archaeologists have overturned that
consensus. Their research suggests that
people were inventing farming at several
would leave for months at a time to herd sites in the Fertile Crescent at roughly the
sheep and goats in the surrounding hills. same time.
Sites like Ain Ghazal provide a glimpse
In the late 1980s, Ofer Bar­Yosef of Har­
of one of the most important transitions in vard and his colleagues began excavating
human history — the moment that people a 23,000­year­old site on the shores of
domesticated plants and animals, settled the Sea of Galilee known as Ohalo II. It
down, and began to produce the kind of consisted of half a dozen brush huts.
society in which most of us live today.
Last year, Bar­Yosef and his colleagues
But archaeologists are still grappling reported that one of the huts contained
with some questions. Who exactly were 150,000 charred seeds and fruits, includ­
the first farmers? How did agriculture, a ing almonds, grapes and olives, that would
cornerstone of civilisation itself, spread to later become crops. A stone blade found
at Ohalo II seemed to have been used as a
other parts of the world?
Some answers are now emerging from sickle to harvest cereals. A stone slab was
DNA extracted from skeletons at Ain used to grind the seeds. It seems clear the
Ghazal and other early settlements in the inhabitants were cultivating wild plants
Near East.
long before farming was thought to have
"It's a part of the story of civilisation that begun.
we're just beginning to understand," said
DNA breakthroughs
Iosif Lazaridis, a postdoctoral researcher
at Harvard Medical School.
A number of attempts to get DNA out of
Agriculture originated in a few small skeletons in the Near East failed.
"Genetically, the Near East was terra
hubs around the world, but probably first
in the Fertile Crescent, a region of the Near incognita," said David Reich, a geneticist
East including parts of modern­day Iraq, at Harvard Medical School.
But in two recent studies, geneticists
Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. The
evidence for full­blown agriculture there including Reich used new methods to fish
— crops, livestock, tools for food prepa­ out enough DNA from the bones of the first
ration, and villages — dates back about farmers to figure out their relationship
to other people. A team of researchers
11,000 years.
In the 1990s, archaeologists largely based at Johannes Gutenberg University
concluded that farming in the Fertile in Mainz, Germany, reconstructed the
Crescent began in Jordan and Israel, a genomes of four early farmers from the
region known as the southern Levant. Zagros Mountains whose bones date back
"The model was that everything started as much as 10,000 years.
Reich and his colleagues — including
there, and then spread out from there,
Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at Uni­
East. Reich's group discovered even older
genetic material from hunter­gatherers
in the region, from as far back as 14,000
years ago. The new results point to the
conclusion that the first farmers in each
region were the descendants of the ear­
lier hunter­gatherers. What's more, each
population had its own distinct ancestry,
going back tens of thousands of years.
They were as different from one another
genetically as the Europeans and Chinese.
And these groups remained distinct
through the agricultural revolution as
they changed from hunter­gatherers to
full­blown farmers.
Archaeologists have welcomed the new
results from the geneticists. But they are
interpreting the data in different ways.
Zeder said ancient DNA supports a
scenario where farmers across the Fertile
Crescent independently invented agricul­
ture, perhaps repeatedly. But Bar­Yosef
says he thinks full­blown agriculture
evolved only once, and then quickly spread
from one group to another.
He points to the increasingly precise
dating of archaeological sites in the
Fertile Crescent. Instead of the southern
Levant, the oldest sites with evidence of
full­blown agriculture are in northern
Syria and southern Turkey. That's where
Bar­Yosef thinks agriculture began.
'You just map the dates" of the sites at
which the evidence for farming is found,
he said, "and you see it's always later as
you get away from the core area."
And the people of Ain Ghazal? Their
population expanded into East Africa,
bringing crops and animals with them.
In Somalia, a third of people's DNA comes
from the southern Levant.
Ipsos Kenya ­ Acorn House,97 James Gichuru Road ­ Lavington ­ Nairobi ­ Kenya
The East African Magazine
Date: 24.10.2016
Page 9
Article size: 486 cm2
ColumnCM: 108.0
AVE: 162000.0
Ipsos Kenya ­ Acorn House,97 James Gichuru Road ­ Lavington ­ Nairobi ­ Kenya