Valley in Jordan Inhabited and Irrigated for 13,000 Years

[Adsos Letter]

Source: ScienceDaily

You can make major discoveries by walking across a field and picking up every loose item you find. Dutch researcher Eva Kaptijn succeeded in discovering -- based on 100,000 finds -- that the Zerqa Valley in Jordan had been successively inhabited and irrigated for more than 13,000 years. But it was not just communities that built irrigation systems: the irrigation systems also built communities.

Archaeologist Eva Kaptijn has given up digging in favour of gathering. With her colleagues, she has been applying an intensive field exploration technique: 15 metres apart, the researchers would walk forward for 50 metres. On the outward leg, they'd pick up all the earthenware and, on the way back, all of the other material. This resulted in more than 100,000 finds, varying from about 13,000 years to just a few decades old.

Based on further research on the finds and where they were located, Kaptijn succeeded in working out the extent of habitation in the Zerqa Valley in Jordan over the past millennia. The area where she undertook her research is also called the Zerqa Triangle; it is bounded by the River Zerqa and forms part of the Jordan Valley. The area covers roughly 72 square kilometres. Kaptijn discovered that the triangle had been inhabited, on and off, for thousands of years, but that this habitation was always highly dependent on the irrigation methods used by those who lived there. While the soil in the valley is very rich, there was usually not enough rainfall to cultivate plants without some additional irrigation.

Irrigation shapes the community

The irrigation methods exerted a major influence on the people who lived in the valley; power was often dependent on controlling the allocation of water. Kaptijn discovered that the type of irrigation system could result in a community of internally egalitarian tribes, with these tribes being linked to each other in a strict, hierarchical order. At other times, the valley was actually dominated by a large-scale, almost capitalist cultivation of sugar cane. Eva Kaptijn's research is part of the multi-disciplinary project Settling the Steppe. The Archaeology of changing societies in Syro-Palestinian drylands during the Bronze and Iron Ages. This project is funded by the NWO's Open Competition scheme.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091215155956.htm

[xchrom]

1. Recomend

[gateley]

2. I love stuff like this -- thanks!! nt

[emilyg]

3. Yes!!!!!!!

[starroute]

4. Even cooler -- they may have had the first pussycats

The article quoted below talks about wild relatives of the domestic cat still living in "the remote deserts of Israel and Saudi Arabia." But the ones who got domesticated weren't living in the remote deserts -- they were in the places where people first started to farm, like this valley.

And though the article gives a date of 10,000 years ago for domestication, given how long cats take to make their minds up about anything, it means they must have been hanging around the human villages, catching the mice in the granaries, and laughing at the people busting their asses in the fields for a few thousand years before they decided to get out of the "vicious predator" business and start sucking up.

In other words -- and I'm completely serious about this -- this looks like an excellent candidate for the time and place where cats first moved in and made themselves at home.


http://www.livescience.com/animals/070628_cat_family.html

28 June 2007

Domestic cats have been traced back to a single wild ancestor whose relatives still live in the remote deserts of the Middle East today.

The transformation of a vicious predator into a docile tabby took place some 10,000 years ago, a new genetic analysis suggests. That is the same time humans adopted an agricultural lifestyle in the Fertile Crescent. So the first of the friendly cats likely acted as a mouse hunter for grain-storage areas.

“We think that was the beginning of one of the most interesting natural history experiments ever done,” said Stephen O’Brien, a geneticist at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, “which is the changing of a wild, ferocious predator into a friendly mouser that decided to hang its wagon on humankind.” ...

The DNA from domestic cats matched up with that of the Near Eastern wildcat subspecies Felis silvestris lybica, which lives in the remote deserts of Israel and Saudi Arabia.

[bertman]

6. My tabby, Bubba, just read this and said that crap about turning from vicious predator into

docile tabby is BALONEY. He told me he's going to bring me a vole in the morning, just to prove it. Right now, he's holding down the sofa in the living room.

Bubba is one bad mofo. He was seen in a Mexican standoff with a grey fox in our yard one day. Good thing my wife happened upon the scene or Bubba might've been a goner.

Great post, starroute.

[gmoney]

5. Unpossible! World's only 6000 years old!

[bertman]

7. Thanks for posting, Adsos Letter. Rec.