The cities and skyscrapers we see today all owe their awe-inspiring existence to one simple decision humans made a long time ago: farming - the idea of settling down and cultivating. How exactly this decision was made is still a mystery, but a new study shows that our agricultural tendencies arose in more than one place at once.
A recent archaeological excavation in southwestern Iran revealed that farming had its roots in more than one place at approximately the same time in the Fertile Crescent, aptly named for being the cradle of modern day civilization. In the foothills of the Zargos mountains, archaeologists unearthed a number of tools, animal bones, and most importantly, " the richest deposits of charred plant remains ever recovered from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East," says Universitaet Tübingen press release.
"I've never seen a site so rich," said Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tuebingen.
Among the charred plant remains, scientists found large deposits of weeds, which would have been attracted by the farming and is a "signature of civilization," said Melinda Zeder, a scientist at the Smithsonian Institute's Program in Human Ecology and Archaeobiology, in a Los Angeles Times article.
Until now, compelling evidence for the cultivation of agriculture was mostly sprinkled along the western and northern fronts of the Fertile Crescent. The new dig, along with the new study detailing the findings in the journal Science, shows that the eastern region of the Fertile Crescent also exhibited the same tendencies some 11,700 years ago.
The study sheds light on how agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent, but doesn't answer some key questions - why exactly was the Fertile Crescent so hospitable to agriculture? And how did the idea of agriculture spread? The team hopes that their findings will help elicit answers.
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