I copied this from sci.med.nutrition. It suggests early man worked hard to find edible grains:
The following was posted to the Calorie Restriction Society
newsgroup by "Liza May". I thought it might interest the folks
here. Sprouted oats and barley grains are an important part
of my diet. So, I found Liza's post very interesting.
George
11,000-year-old grain shakes up beliefs on beginnings of agriculture
Bar-Ilan University researchers have found a cache of 120,000 wild oat and
260,000 wild barley grains at the Gilgal archaeological site near Jericho
that date back 11,000 years - providing evidence of cultivation during the
Neolithic Period.
The research, performed by Drs. Ehud Weiss and Anat Hartmann of BIU's
department of Land of Israel studies and Prof. Mordechai Kislev of the
faculty of life sciences, appears in the June 16 edition of the prestigious
journal Science.
It is the second time in two weeks that Kislev and Hartmann have had an
article in Science. They recently wrote about their discovery of
10,000-year-old cultivated figs at the same Jordan Valley site.
According to the researchers, the newest find shows that the transition from
nomadic food gathering and the beginning of agriculture were quite different
than previously thought. Until now, the general assumption has been that
agriculture was begun by a single line of human efforts in one specific
area. But the BIU researchers found a much more complicated effort
undertaken by different human populations in different regions, drawing a
completely new picture of the origins of agriculture.
Agriculture, the BIU researchers suggest, originated through human
manipulations of wild plants - sometimes involving the same species - that
took place in various spatially and temporally distinct communities.
Moreover, some of these occasions were found to be much earlier than
previously thought possible.
The researchers analyzed archeo-botanical data from Near Eastern
archeological sites to locate human attempts to grow early crops. Several
plant species, which they term "pioneer crops," were found to be the
earliest plants manipulated by humans. Some of these attempts succeeded,
which means that domestication and continuity were achieved, while others
were abandoned. They offer a model of a pioneer agriculture with its
disappointments and achievements.
They were certain that the grains found at Gilgal were cultivated and not
found naturally in the environment because they were found in such large
quantities and because field observations showed that only moderate amounts
could be gathered from natural growing sites in this part of the Jordan
Valley, even in rainy years.
Although pioneer crops such as barley, lentils, rye and oats yielded
satisfactory crops, early farmers faced the problem that their seeds would
fall off immediately after ripening. One way to solve this problem was
through domestication (causing a process by which plants would retain their
seeds, rather than shedding them, to facilitate collection by farmers).
But the researchers found that not all crops were easily domesticated,
causing our ancestors, the researchers maintain, to abandon certain crops
(such as oats) for thousands of years, until different farmers in other
parts of the world finally domesticated them.
This new hypothesis turns the spotlight on the peoples who were involved in
creating a revolutionary new agricultural way of life. According to the
researchers, it was not a particular individual or community who changed the
way we live our lives today, but rather many human groups scattered
throughout the world who manipulated several different local wild plants.
Some of these groups failed in their attempts and some succeeded. Some
plants were domesticated and some were abandoned.
Moreover, some of the plants abandoned during the Neolithic Period were
later domesticated in other parts of the world. Barley and, most likely,
oats, were cultivated in the Jordan Valley, represented by the early
Neolithic site Gilgal.
Cont'd (Jerusalem Post):
http://tinyurl.com/r5vr7