Discovery: Grain storage began well before farming

WASHINGTON | People were storing grain long before they learned to domesticate crops, a new study indicates.

A structure used as a food granary discovered in recent excavations in Jordan dates to about 11,300 years ago, according to a report in last week’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That’s as much as a thousand years before people in the Middle East domesticated grain, the research team led by anthropologist Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame said. …

… The ability to store food is essential for the development of farming, the researchers said.

“The granaries represent a critical evolutionary shift in the relationship between people and plant foods, which precedes the emergence of domestication and large-scale sedentary communities by at least 1,000 years,” they reported. …