reply to post by warrenb
Im not missiing the point at all, in fact Iwas spot on, as was attested to by subsequent information, they were harvesting wild grains and storing
them. It was the need to store and prepare food by foraging peoples that at the basis of the many advances in our way of life. The first uses of
pottery can be traced back to foraging societies, and as this discovery points to and so can the idea of building permanent buildings and larger
settlements.
And they were still chipping stone tools and occasionaly poking each other with sticks, as primative foraging societies still do to this day.
It doesnt really change anything all that much it just shows that foraging societies in the middle east were thinking of the future by saving grains
they harvested for later use.
Ntive americans of the northern midwest harvested wild rice from boats, yet practiced no other agriculture.
Side note, the philipino martial art escrima( the two sticks system) has its roots in wild rice harvesting. One stick is used to gather the stalks
togtether and pull them over the side of a canoe, the the other stick is slid down the first to knock the grains into the boat.
The exact same method used by native americans to gather wild rice into canoes.
These people would have been developmentaly on par with many native american tribes in california and elsewhere in the new world, or many other pre
agricultural peoples around the world.
There are still tribes in New guinea and africa that practice this type of lifestyle.
I would also bet that the real origins of agriculture are to found in the root crops, they dont need to proccesed to make them edible.
And in the primative foraging/agricultural societies the root crops are the basic staples in most cases.
It is still fascinating stuff nonethe less.
It took us literaly hundreds of thousands of years to get to that point
