Edible figs. The ancient fig (top), covered with gold - ready for SEM photography - is similar in size to an Iranian commercial variety (middle). These are much smaller figs than a common variety of Turkish fig (bottom).
Credit: Jonathan Reif
SYDNEY, 5 June 2006 - A new discovery has suggested that the beginnings of agriculture and the domestication of plants pre-dates current theories by a millennium.
Remains of figs found in an 11,400-year-old house in Gilgal 1, an early Neolithic village in the Jordan Valley, Israel, came from a type of fig tree that could only have survived with the help of human propagation.
"Fig trees could have been the first domesticated plant of the Neolithic revolution, which preceded cereal domestication by about a thousand years," wrote the researchers, Mordechai Kislev and Anat Hartmann from Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Ofer Bar-Yosef from Harvard University, USA in a paper in the U.S. journal Science.
Nine figs were found in the house along with food collected from the wild. The figs came from parthenocarpic trees. A naturally occurring mutation in the wild, parthenocarpic plants produce fruit without having been pollinated, which means the resulting fruit are unable to produce new plants. In nature, such mutant plants would simply die as they are unable to reproduce in the same manner as their counterparts. They can be propagated though cuttings, however.
Most figs of the area produced inedible fruit which dropped from the tree before they were ripe but the parthenocarpic figs stayed on the tree until they were sweet and edible. Such desirable qualities were recognised by the people of the time and they obviously learned how to propagate these trees in order to produce more fruit.
"Fig trees, whether parthenocarpic or not, are pre-adapted for relatively easy domestication because the cuttings develop roots more easily than those of any other fruit tree," noted the researchers. Such a quality, along with the desirable taste of the fig, may explain why the domestication of the fruit preceded other fruiting plants such as the olive and the grape.
To ensure that propagation of the fig was a regular practice within the early culture, the researchers also collected samples from a settlement nearby of the same period, Netiv Hagdud. The figs found in this settlement, one and a half kilometres from Gilgal one, were also parthenocarpic, demonstrating that the domestication of this plant was commonplace in the Neolithic villages.
The "strategy of these early Neolithic farmers was a mixed exploitation of wild plants and initial fig domestication. Apparently, this kind of economy was widely practised," wrote the researchers.
