I copied this from sci.med.nutrition. It suggests early man worked hard to find edible grains:

The following was posted to the Calorie Restriction Society
newsgroup by "Liza May". I thought it might interest the folks
here. Sprouted oats and barley grains are an important part
of my diet. So, I found Liza's post very interesting.

George


11,000-year-old grain shakes up beliefs on beginnings of agriculture


Bar-Ilan University researchers have found a cache of 120,000 wild oat and
260,000 wild barley grains at the Gilgal archaeological site near Jericho
that date back 11,000 years - providing evidence of cultivation during the
Neolithic Period.


The research, performed by Drs. Ehud Weiss and Anat Hartmann of BIU's
department of Land of Israel studies and Prof. Mordechai Kislev of the
faculty of life sciences, appears in the June 16 edition of the prestigious
journal Science.


It is the second time in two weeks that Kislev and Hartmann have had an
article in Science. They recently wrote about their discovery of
10,000-year-old cultivated figs at the same Jordan Valley site.


According to the researchers, the newest find shows that the transition from
nomadic food gathering and the beginning of agriculture were quite different
than previously thought. 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.


The researchers analyzed archeo-botanical data from Near Eastern
archeological sites to locate human attempts to grow early crops. Several
plant species, which they term "pioneer crops," were found to be the
earliest plants manipulated by humans. Some of these attempts succeeded,
which means that domestication and continuity were achieved, while others
were abandoned. They offer a model of a pioneer agriculture with its
disappointments and achievements.


They were certain that the grains found at Gilgal were cultivated and not
found naturally in the environment because they were found in such large
quantities and because field observations showed that only moderate amounts
could be gathered from natural growing sites in this part of the Jordan
Valley, even in rainy years.


Although pioneer crops such as barley, lentils, rye and oats yielded
satisfactory crops, early farmers faced the problem that their seeds would
fall off immediately after ripening. One way to solve this problem was
through domestication (causing a process by which plants would retain their
seeds, rather than shedding them, to facilitate collection by farmers).


But the researchers found that not all crops were easily domesticated,
causing our ancestors, the researchers maintain, to abandon certain crops
(such as oats) for thousands of years, until different farmers in other
parts of the world finally domesticated them.


This new hypothesis turns the spotlight on the peoples who were involved in
creating a revolutionary new agricultural way of life. According to the
researchers, it was not a particular individual or community who changed the
way we live our lives today, but rather many human groups scattered
throughout the world who manipulated several different local wild plants.
Some of these groups failed in their attempts and some succeeded. Some
plants were domesticated and some were abandoned.


Moreover, some of the plants abandoned during the Neolithic Period were
later domesticated in other parts of the world. Barley and, most likely,
oats, were cultivated in the Jordan Valley, represented by the early
Neolithic site Gilgal.


Cont'd (Jerusalem Post):
http://tinyurl.com/r5vr7

Then comes the question, were they cultivating crops for animal feed or planning to eat all this fodder themselves?

There are so many aspects of the transition to agriculture not covered that it boggles the mind. Everywhere man started to create permanent settlements necessitated crops, whether for people or livestock. 10,000 BC has always been a round number - not the holy grail. There must be some places where it was earlier or much later. The article doesn't address the issue of why there was a transition to crops - as in not enough meat available for the number of people. Nor does it mention the degraded health left in the records of the bones and teeth. There was an unfortunate trade-off to become heavy plant eaters.

I've seen skeletons from Arizona that showed the wear from eating plants. They didn't have periodontal disease but the grinding added stone grit to the flour which was then chewed. A logical reason for cultivating was to augment the season when animals migrated. Earlier man probably followed the migration but once they cultivated grain were able to stay put. We evolved into omnivores and given enough millenia might have evolved onto herbivores. In that sense, man was moving away from carnivorism.

Ten thousand years ago isn't early man, it's very, very LATE man.



Homo and Australopithecus were omnivores. We've always been omnivores. An omnivorous species could probably evolve into a herbivorous species in like ten million years (ten thousand millennia).

I'm not sure why we would, though.

We are more carnivorian then omnivore, just compare our digestive tracks
http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/ca...comparison.html

i dont support "we evolved into omnivores" theorie, as our abilities to for example, convert beta caroten to vitamine a, and convert omega 3 from plants to the omega 3 we need, is actually fading away.

In my opinion, early man just ate anything he could get his hands on that didnt kill him! But he was clever and managed over time to cultivate and store food for himself, meat, veg and grain. The difference between then and now is the quantity, the availablity and the lack of energy used to get it!

jo

By publishing the findings in grains rather than pounds or bushels, it's hard to imagine how much of the oats or barley was in the cache.

Interestingly, the 120,000 grains of oats works out to just 15-pounds of oats, or less than 1/2 a bushel....considering the yeild of the highest quality oat is 90 bushels an acre, this quantity was either from a very small section of land (think the size of a backyard garden plot) or could have been gathered from wild plants/plantings in the area.

Same with the barley...260,000 grains (unhusked pearls) sounds like a mess of them, but it's about 35 pounds, or 3/4 of a bushel of barley. Barley yeilds 50 bushels an acre, so this cache wasn't from a big field and also potentially could have been gathered from wild plants/plantings in the area.

Combined, the two stores would only provide (when cooked) about 450 half-cup servings...not exactly what a group/tribe would be looking at as its sustinance over any long period of time or depending on for nutrients. Simply not enough food for any group of people for any real period of time. My guess - it was there for emergencies....it's not enough to be the major source of calories in a group diet.

Good point, Regina!

also it might have been there for seed, and the food grain was eaten already

Could be, except the quantity is then even worse than if it were food stores....to plant just an acre of oats you need 120-pounds of seed to yeild the acre; for barley you need 100-pounds of seed to yeild the acre. If this were seed stores for planting later, it's a paltry amount that would have a dismal yield potential for food.

Just for argument's sake, aren't you extrapolating modern man's caloric needs, not knowing what needs were 10,000 yrs ago? I'm sure they were forced to live a "CR" lifestyle. Early man might have averaged 5ft, 80lbs? Bloated modern mans needs 2000 calories per day. Early man may have survived on 500 calories a day?

I assume that's hyperbole. People from 10K BCE weren't all that different from us just somewhat smaller on average - not a quarter of our height!

We didn't evolve into ominvores as much as we evolved to survive eating almost anything. We come from herbivorous ancestors, and we became increasingly carnivorous. Because of our lineage, our bodies are not adapted to hunting. To successfully acquire the most valuable nutrition (other animals), we would have to use our brains. The best hunters were the smartest. They were also the most reproductively successful. Fast forward and humankind has become so brilliant from hunting (the nutrition/challenge of meat) that we invent agriculture. Everything resulting from agriculture - technology, societies, and nutrition - is completely at odds with what is natural for us and the world. So successful, we have destroyed natural order and will be consumed by the incongruencies between our world and the real world. Ironic, but that's life.

Anyway. One of the reasons humankind has been as successful as it has is because of how we can thrive in such a diverse range of environments. From complete carnivores, to heavily vegetarian, we can eat almost anything and live. More specialized creatures do not enjoy this advantage, they are adversely affected by slight change in ecosystem. It's not so much that we evolved into omnivores, it's more that we became increasingly carnivorous while also retaining much of our herbivorous traits. It was adaptive to keep them, so we did.

Makes sense. It's why man survived in the arctic and the tropics. We have the brain needed for survival in all conditions. But we haven't evolved to eat sensibly, sad to say.