The First Turkish Farmers

Humans have always known the ways grow food and not only relying on hunting animals and collecting other kinds of edible food which are always available. Around 23, 000 years back there have been the earliest signs of cultivation in Ohalo, northern Israel. However planned sowing and reaping (aka agriculture) is considered to vanish no more than about 12,000 years and should be developed in the Fertile Crescent of southwest Asia, a region that includes parts of Israel, Iran, Iraq, Jordan and southern Turkey.

A genetic study published in Nature Communications and theories of Prof. Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University states proper agriculture should have begun in southeastern Turkey Anatolia possibly with prehistoric Iran involved too. The study reveals that at least 10,000 years ago, local hunter-gatherers in Anatolia had changed their subsistence strategy in order to begin farming, as opposed to learning the practice from migrants from the Levant. With these migrants, the knowledge of agriculture had spread around 2500 years later. There have been Anatolia migrants when the farmers migrated from Anatolia to mainland Europe in the eighth millennium and brought their specialist skills with them to mainland Europe. In fact, they apparently overwhelmed the local hunter-gatherers — replacing them almost entirely. However, this is also a fact that it was Anatolia where farming began. But the archaeological evidence indicates that Anatolia had one of the earliest farming communities in the world. Also the research says that single largest component of the ancestry of modern-day Europeans comes from these Anatolian farmers. However the genetic analysis does show some intermixing with the neighbors because when farming had begun in Anatolia which was around 10,300 to 9,800 years ago, the locals had about a 10 percent genetic contribution from people in Iran and the Caucasus, the researchers stated however the other was still Anatolian hunter-gatherer. Also it is known that the early Anatolian farmers were direct descendants of a gene pool that remained relatively stable for at least 7,000 years irrespective of the climate changes, the fluctuations of life and other factors. Max Planck’s Choongwon Jeong, co-senior author of the study, stated that their study provides additional, genetic support for previous archaeological evidence that suggests that Anatolia was not merely a stepping stone in a movement of early farmers from the Fertile Crescent into Europe. Their study also claimed that it was a place where local hunter-gatherers adopted ideas, plants and technology that led to agricultural subsistence. Before the Copper Age, thousands of years ago, the Neolithic Anatolian culture did have Levantine and Persian elements and had rich cultural and material ties around the Mediterranean basin.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium.MAGAZINE-were-the-first-farmers-turkish-1.7285817