Were figs the first crops?
Fig trees may have been mankind's first real agricultural crop: they were apparently domesticated in the Middle East some 11,400 years ago, about a thousand years earlier than wheat, barley or legumes.
With their finds, Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University and Mordechai Kislev and Anat Hartmann of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Ga, Israel, advanced the first known use of the fruit by 5000 years. They discovered and dated nine dried, over time carbonized figs and 313 granules that were once part of the fruiting body at the Gilgal I archaeological site in the lower Jordan Valley-a village that was abandoned as a settlement site some 11,200 years ago. A comparison with current wild and cultivated figs then confirmed that the prehistoric fruit was also a mutated and man-made form.
This mutation forms so-called parthenocarpic - virgin - figs, which develop without insect pollination and also do not fall from the trees. This allows soft, sweet and, above all, edible fruits to ripen, but seeds do not form - the plant can only be propagated artificially by cuttings. The inhabitants of the Jordan Valley at that time therefore had to actively intervene in order to obtain this food source for themselves. In addition to the dried figs, the archaeologists also found acorns and the seeds of wild barley and wild oats, which provide the first indications of the later cultivation of the grain types during the so-called Neolithic Revolution.
