Cereals gathered as early as 23,000 BP in Syria

Also found at Science Daily, based on research by the University of Warwick (lead: R. Allabin).

The origins of Mesolithic (properly speaking: the transition between hunter-gathering and agriculture and animal husbandry) have been pushed back by many milennia to c. 23,000 BP, before the last glacial maximum. At least that seems true for Syria, where people started gathering cereals at such early date, at the site of Ohalo II, what implies a very long Mesolithic of some 12,000 years.

The research by Allabin et al. focuses on modelling the actual evoluton of domesticated crops, questioning the single origin paradigm.