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.
Good article. Shows how complex the whole issue of agricultural "origins" can be.