Late Pleistocene and early Holocene climate and the beginnings of cultivation in northern Syria

Abstract

Climate change has been interpreted as a contributing factor to the emergence of agriculture in the Near East. We examine how climate change may have affected the availability of food plants and their cultivation in northern Syria at the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene. Charred plant remains from sites representing 11 archaeological levels indicate that during the late Pleistocene rye was commonly used, together with seeds gathered from the floodplain. During the early Holocene, rye and floodplain plants go out of use and barley then emmer wheat become common, pulses, lentils, peas and vetches increase in use and figs, chickpeas and horse beans were introduced. Pre-domestic cultivation is difficult to identify in the absence of morphologically domesticated plants. We cannot identify precisely when cultivation started but the possibility of cultivation is not excluded for the late Pleistocene, however we argue that it did not become a reliable means of subsistence until the Holocene. This period coincides with a decrease in the amplitude of climatic oscillations and global warming. With these conditions, combined with an increase in rainfall, we suggest cultivation developed into a sustainable economy. The earliest morphologically domestic cereals found in this area date to about 10 000 cal. yr BP. These may have been slow to become established because seed for sowing may have occasionally been replenished from the wild.