The first human farmers continued to forage a wide diet from nature

New Scientist

Image: Alfred Grupstra

It is a familiar tale: when humans started farming, their lifestyles changed radically and forever. People stopped foraging, and had a narrower, nutritionally poorer diet. But new evidence suggests we may need to rethink this story.

Farming arose in many places, but the “Fertile Crescent”, an area that today includes parts of Egypt, Iraq and other countries, was one of the first. Many archaeologists assume that there was a big shift in what people there ate when they became farmers 12,000 years ago. For thousands of years, they had gathered and eaten a wide range of plants, whereas the early farmers mostly grew and ate flax, barley, chickpeas and einkorn.

This assumption hadn’t been rigorously tested, say Michael Wallace and Glynis Jones at the University of Sheffield, UK. So they examined archaeological evidence from 75 sites across the Fertile Crescent, all between about 7000 and 14,000 years old. Read more on newscientist.com…