IT SOUNDS simple, obvious even. But it was the first step towards cultivating crops, which spawned the dawn of agriculture.
Stone Age humans in the Fertile Crescent appear to have harvested wild wheat and barley by scooping fallen grains from the ground with their fingers. This foraging would often have provided ample surpluses 鈥� perhaps even enough to encourage early humans to experiment with sowing seeds.
Until now, most anthropologists believed fallen grains would have been eaten by ants or rodents, and that what was left over would soon have been buried in the soil. But when Ehud Weiss of Harvard University and Mordechai Kislev and Anat Hartmann of Bar-Ilan University in Israel grew wheat and barley at three sites in Israel, they found that fallen seeds persisted for more than five months in patches so dense that a person could scoop up a day鈥檚 ration in just an hour or two (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0308739101).
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The archaeological evidence fits, too. Cereals cut with a sickle will contain poorly formed grains from the base of the ear, but few of these are seen in the remains of ancient grain stores. Similarly, grain that has been stripped or beaten from the stalk contains nearly-ripe kernels. Yet stored ancient grains are almost all fully ripe, implying they fell from the stalk naturally.