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["Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>]

Speaking of things homesteading-ish, I thought this article was interesting.

Lynda
>
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

In the ruins of a prehistoric village near Jericho, in the West Bank, 
scientists have found remains of figs that they say appear to be the 
earliest known cultivated fruit crop, perhaps the first evidence anywhere of 
domesticated food production at the dawn of agriculture. The figs were grown 
some 11,400 years ago.

Presumably that was well after Adam and Eve tried on the new look in fig 
leaves, in which case the fig must have grown wild in Eden.

Two botanists and an archaeologist, who describe the discovery in today's 
issue of the journal Science, said the figs came from cultivated trees  that 
grew about 1,000 years before such staples as wheat, barley and chickpeas 
were widely domesticated in the Middle East. These grain and legume crops 
had been considered the first steps in agriculture.

The researchers uncovered nine small figs in the ruins of a burned building. 
The fire left the figs charred, preserving them in a condition for detailed 
analysis. The researchers established the age of the cache by dating the 
fire's remains.

A comparison with modern wild and domesticated varieties, the scientists 
said, led them to conclude that the ancient figs had undergone a  mutation 
in the wild that produced a sweet fruit but no fertile seeds.

Because these trees were a reproductive dead end, the botanists reasoned, 
they could have been propagated only by people planting shoots of the 
variant strain again and again. A piece of stem stuck in the ground will 
sprout roots and grow into a tree, which could explain why figs were 
domesticated much earlier than grapes, olives and other fruit plants.

The archaeobotanists who conducted the study were Mordechai Kislev and
Anat Hartman of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Their co-author of the 
journal report was Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist at the Peabody Museum of 
Harvard.

In an interview by telephone from Israel, Dr. Bar-Yosef said that he was 
"confident about the identification of the figs as being of a domesticated 
variety" and that they were probably the earliest known domesticated crop. 
The cultivation technique, he said, seemed to be well enough advanced to 
suggest that people had thus been intervening in nature for several 
centuries.

Dr. Bar-Yosef noted that the experimental technique of repeated plantings 
was similar to the methods by which hunter-gatherers collected wild grains 
and legumes and gradually developed cultivated crops.

Over the last century, scientists have scoured the Middle East for traces of 
the origins of agriculture and argued over what the first crops were and 
where they were grown. Dr. Bar-Yosef contends that the first cultivated 
grains were introduced in what is now Israel and north into the upper 
Euphrates River valley. Other researchers think the most likely origins were 
in southern Turkey.

But scholars agree with Dr. Bar-Yosef that the beginning of agriculture, 
whether with the first sweet fig or ripe grain, was pivotal in human 
cultural evolution.

"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," Dr. Bar-Yosef said in a statement from Harvard. "People 
decided to intervene in nature and supply their own food rather than relying 
on what was provided by the gods."

June 2, 2006
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/science/02fig.html