Agriculture is believed to have dawned around 12,000 years ago, in the Levant or southern Turkey. Now remains of a 23,000-year-old camp, including flint sickle blades and extraordinarily preserved botanical remains, found on the shore of the Sea of Galilee (Israel) throws back the start of cereal cultivation by thousands of years.
     Analysis of the sheen on the flint blades and of the seeds proves that the Paleolithic inhabitants of the site called 'Ohalo II' lived a chiefly hunting-gathering-fishing lifestyle, but were indeed growing wheat and barley.
     "Most people feel that agriculture is much more complex, that it is central to the economy, that everybody was geared into it. Here we have evidence for small-scale auxiliary cereal growing," said Prof. Dani Nadel of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology. The Ohalo inhabitants clearly collected a lot from nature, both plants and animals, he elaborates. "These grains they grew would have augmented their hunter-gatherer diet, which consisted mainly of fish from the lake, animals they hunted or scavenged, birds,especially water fowl, and plants," says Nadel. "Cereal cultivation was just one of many strategies they had. Their eggs were not all in one basket. They would have tried all sorts of things."
     The prehistoric camp was discovered by archaeologists when the water level in the Sea of Galilee fell to a low point in modern times. Immersion in the lakewater and protection by silt preserved the oldest-known remains of brush huts and grass bedding known in the world, wooden tools, food remains, and beads made of shells from the Mediterranean Sea. The excavators also found a lot of stone tools, including sickle blades that were used to harvest grain. It is the carbon-14 dating of the charred grains and plant remains that led to the date of around 23,000 years.
     The five sickle blades found at Ohalo II have a sheen created by their use to cut grasses, and from the hands holding them, says Dr. Iris Groman-Yaroslavski of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa. Use-wear analysis of the veneer indicates that while they were used, they were not used much, she explains: That supports the thesis that cultivated, harvested grain was a supplement to their main diet of hunted and gathered foods and fish. We do know though that their cultivation of grain was not a one-off event.
     At Ohalo II, the archaeologists found the remains of six brush huts, the fireplaces, a shallow grave with the complete body of a disabled man, who had to have been cared for, and what seems to be a garbage dump. The huts had burned down before the camp was submerged, but their charred remains remain. They were not small - one was oval in shape and almost 15 feet long; some were kidney-shaped. The base of the hut floors were some 20 to 40 centimeters below ground level: analysis of the charred wall remains shows they were made of grasses and branches, including salt cedar, oak and willow.
     The archaeologists found no evidence of post-holes in or near the huts; they seem to have been constructed by sticking long branches into holes in the ground. Their floors were littered with bones, mainly of fish and gazelle but of birds too, ground stone tools and fragments, and thousands of flint flakes, blades and well-shaped tools, indicating that knapping happened there.
     Among the litter on the floor were remains of seeds and fruits - and in one case a large basalt stone that had been used to grind wild grasses, based on starch-grain analysis and the seeds found around it.
     So did cereal cultivation begin at least 23,000 years ago, not more recently as thought? Was the Galilee aswarm with early farmers? We still don't know, but we can say that hunter-gatherers living on the shores of the Sea of Galilee occupied their camp on a year-round basis, and cultivated cereals.

Edited from Haaretz (20 February 2017)