9,000-year-old barley consumption in the foothills of central Asia.

Scholars are increasingly favoring models for the origins of agriculture that involve a protracted process of increasing interdependence within a series of mutualistic relationships between humans and plants, as opposed to a rapid single event or innovation. Nonetheless, these scholars continue to debate over when people first started foraging for grass seeds, when they began to readily utilize sickles, how prominent the early selection pressures were, and when the first traits of domestication fully introgressed into the cultivated grass population. Here, we present complementary archaeobotanical and archaeological (stone tool) evidence for cereal foragers from Toda-1 Cave in the Surkhan Darya, dating to 9200 cal BP.

A biomolecular perspective on mobile pastoralism and its role in wider socioeconomic connections in the Chalcolithic South Caucasus.

Mobile pastoralism is widely evoked when discussing technological developments, resource procurement, -regional interactions, and exchange networks in the South Caucasus. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive multiproxy investigation of faunal and botanical remains from the Middle to Late Chalcolithic in southern Armenia, at the high altitude Yeghegis-1 site, to directly assess herd mobility and human subsistence practices. Our findings indicate that, alongside intensified interregional connectivity, the inhabitants practiced a rather sedentary form of multi-resource pastoralism, while maintaining herds at the site year-round.

Contrasting diachronic regional trends in cereal grain evolution across Eurasia: a metadata analysis of linear morphometrics from the ninth millennium BCE to today.

The domestication of grain crops is among the most important phenomena to facilitate humanity's cultural development, and seed size increases are taken as one of the earliest domestication traits. Much remains unknown about the ecological drivers and cultural mechanisms surrounding this trait, but morphometric analyses have been crucial to investigate the topic for decades. Measurements on ancient cereal grains show that they evolved to produce larger seeds in their region of origin prior to dispersing beyond their progenitor range.

Seeking consensus on the domestication concept.

The domestication of plants and animals permitted the development of cities and social hierarchies, as well as fostering cultural changes that ultimately led humanity into the modern world. Despite the importance of this set of related evolutionary phenomena, scholars have not reached a consensus on what the earliest steps in the domestication process looked like, how long the seminal portions of the process took to unfold, or whether humans played a conscious role in parts or all of it. Likewise, many scholars find it difficult to disentangle the cultural processes of cultivation from the biological processes of domestication.