SUBSISTENCE

Ohalo II: Wild Cereals Before Farming

~23,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial · Last Glacial Maximum

On the shore of the Sea of Galilee, a camp submerged for 23,000 years preserved wild wheat and barley gathered and ground long before farming.

Ohalo II is a camp of fisher-hunter-gatherers on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, in Israel, occupied during the Last Glacial Maximum and covered by the lake ever since. Waterlogging preserved what normally decays: the floors of brush huts, and about 150,000 charred plant remains in which more than 140 gathered species have been identified. Wild wheat and barley were ground to flour on a stone. Thirteen species that rank today among the common weeds of arable fields lie mixed in that assemblage with wild emmer, barley and oat. Weeds of this kind take hold on ground broken and cleared by people, so the excavators read their presence as a small-scale trial at cultivating wild cereals, eleven millennia before the first farming villages of the region.

Why it matters

Cultivation and domestication stand eleven millennia apart here, which undoes the idea of farming as a single invention: these weeds of broken ground point to tending, exercised on plants that stayed wild in form, while the inherited changes marking a domestic cereal come very much later. The same assemblage moves the turn towards grain in the human diet back by some ten thousand years, since small-grained grasses, later displaced by the cereals, were a staple food at this camp. Farming then reads less as a threshold crossed once than as the hardening of a much older habit.

Dating & uncertainty

Ohalo II is dated between 23,500 and 22,500 calibrated years before present, within the Last Glacial Maximum, and its publications round this to 23,000 years; five centuries either way leave intact the eleven millennia separating the camp from the first farmers. The reading of the seeds is the disputed part. A survey of the modern southern Levant found the same weed species growing in uncultivated stands of wild cereal as in fields, which removes their value as a signature of cultivation. On that view Ohalo II documents intensive gathering, and the trial plot disappears.

Our species’ history as one day

22:14:511 h 45 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day