all Ofer Bar-Yosef stories

Figs likely first domesticated crop

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 10:14:57 -0400

Archaeobotanists have found evidence that the dawn of agriculture may have come with the domestication of fig trees in the Near East some 11,400 years ago, roughly 1,000 years before such staples as wheat, barley, and legumes were domesticated in the region. The discovery dates domesticated figs to a period some 5,000 years earlier than previously thought, making the fruit trees the oldest known domesticated crop.

Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University and Mordechai E. Kislev and Anat Hartmann of Bar-Ilan University report their findings in this week's issue of the journal Science.

Tamed 11,400 years ago, figs likely first domesticated crop

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:27:59 -0400

Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University and Mordechai E. Kislev and Anat Hartmann of Bar-Ilan University reported their findings in the journal Science.

"Eleven thousand years ago, there was a critical switch in the human mind - from exploiting the Earth as it is to actively changing the environment to suit our needs," says Bar-Yosef, professor of anthropology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and curator of Paleolithic archaeology at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. "People decided to intervene in nature and supply their own food rather than relying on what was provided by the gods. This shift to a sedentary lifestyle grounded in the growing of wild crops such as barley and wheat marked a dramatic change from 2.5 million years of humans as mobile hunter-gatherers."

The research was sponsored by the American School of Prehistoric Research at Harvard's Peabody Museum, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Shelby-White-Leon Levy Foundation, and the Koschitzky Foundation at Bar-Ilan University.

Reading ancient campfires

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:26:50 -0400

Ofer Bar-Yosef, Harvard's MacCurdy Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology and head of the Peabody Museum's Stone Age Laboratory, is working in the New Stone Age, known as the Neolithic, when Homo sapiens first domesticated plants. He's particularly interested in the rise of agriculture, dubbed the Neolithic Revolution, a transforming event in human history that set the stage for early villages and the larger civilizations to come. It's his interest in an earlier prehistoric revolution that spurs Bar-Yosef's investigation of the Neolithic. Bar-Yosef believes it was some type of technological revolution that gave Cro-Magnon humans the upper hand over Neanderthals some 35,000 years ago.