Hunter-gatherers stored wild crops: granaries in the Middle East predated plant domestication.

It apparently took a long time to get the Agricultural Revolution off the ground. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers in the Middle East cultivated the early farming life over more than a millennium, thanks largely to their proficiency at building structures to store wild cereals, a new report suggests.

Excavations at [Dhra.sup.1] near the Dead Sea in Jordan have uncovered remnants of four sophisticated granaries built between 11,300 and 11,175 years ago, about a millennium before domesticated plants were known to have been cultivated there, say Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and Bill Finlayson of the Council for British Research in the Levant in Amman, Jordan.

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Microscopic pieces of silica from barley husks were identified in one structure, the researchers report online June 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The granaries were situated between oval-shaped buildings where the researchers found stone tools for grinding wild plants. Intact cereal grains have yet to be found.

Discoveries at [Dhra.sup.1] represent the oldest known clear evidence for systematic storage of wildgrains, Kuijt and Finlayson report. They suggest that ancient residents of [Dhra.sup.1] and several nearby settlements sowed wild cereals in fields and stored surplus food in granaries, making it possible to establish permanent communities before farming of domesticated plants began.

"The most important implication of our findings is that fundamental social changes occurred before plant domestication, including the establishment of fairly permanent settlements, with communal labor and storage, based on cultivated wild plants," Kuijt says.

Researchers now generally accept that people in the Middle East and Asia must have cultivated wild plants for between 1,000 and 2,000 years, with annual harvests in the fall, before domesticated species appeared, remarks Harvard University archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef.

"The discovery in [Dhra.sup.1] provides us with one of the earliest well-built examples" of a food-storage structure from before plants were domesticated, Bar-Yosef says.