Pre-domestication cultivation of wild cereals at Abu Hureyra
- Date
- c. 13,100 – 11,600 years ago (c. 11,100–9600 BCE)
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Levant (Euphrates Valley, Syria)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
At Tell Abu Hureyra on the Euphrates in Syria, archaeobotanical evidence indicates that Epipaleolithic foragers began deliberately cultivating wild cereals — including rye and other large-seeded grasses — around the onset of the Younger Dryas, a sudden return to cold, dry conditions roughly 12,900 years ago.
As climatic deterioration drove wild stands of edible plants away from the settlement, its inhabitants appear to have responded by sowing and tending them near home, an early experiment in cultivation that nonetheless used plants still morphologically wild. This pre-domestication cultivation is a crucial intermediate stage: people were farming in practice before the plants themselves had evolved the domesticated traits, such as tough seed-stalks, that define true crops. Such finds support the view that environmental stress during the Younger Dryas helped push Near Eastern communities toward food production. The interpretation is debated, since fully domesticated cereals do not appear for some millennia afterward, but Abu Hureyra remains a key site for understanding how and why agriculture began.
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Further reading
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