Around 12,800 years ago, Earth collided with fragments of a disintegrating comet, triggering Younger Dryas climate change; this event created environmental conditions at Abu Hureyra, Syria, that favored the earliest known continuous cultivation of domestic-type grains and legumes, along with animal management, adding to the pre-existing practice of hunting-and-gathering. That’s the assertion made by scientists in one of four related papers, all appearing in the journal Science Open: Airbursts and Cratering Impacts.
Abu Hureyra is a mound settlement (commonly known as a tell) located in northern Syria along the Euphrates River.
The ancient site now lies beneath Lake Assad, created when the Tabqa Dam was completed in 1974.
In 1972 and 1973, before the settlement was flooded, archaeologists collected enough evidence of houses, food and tools to identify two sites — a Paleolithic settlement and evidence for an early agricultural society.
The settlement occupants left an abundant and continuous record of seeds, legumes and other foods.
“In this general region, there was a change from more humid conditions that were forested and with diverse sources of food for hunter-gatherers, to drier, cooler conditions when they could no longer subsist only as hunter-gatherers,” said Professor James Kennett, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“The villagers started to cultivate barley, wheat and legumes. This is what the evidence clearly shows.”
By studying these archaeological layers, Professor Kennett and colleagues were able to discern the types of plants that were being collected in the warmer, humid days before the climate changed and in the cooler, drier days after the onset of what we know now as the Younger Dryas cool period.
Before the impact, the inhabitants’ prehistoric diet involved wild legumes and wild-type grains, and small but significant amounts of wild fruits and berries.
In the layers corresponding to the time after…
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