Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c10.6

c10.6

It is not only archaeology that points the way to this area, but the evidence of botany and zoology. The wild grasses ancestral to the present cultivated types of wheat and barley have their natural habitat over just this area, where post-glacial climatic conditions were suitable for their growth. Wild barley is distributed from Asia Minor through Transcaucasia to Persia, Turkestan, and Afghanistan, and probably also in Arabia and Abyssinia. The primitive variety of wheat known as Emmer (*Triticum dicoccum*) extends from Syria and Palestine through Mesopotamia to West Persia, and probably again also in Abyssinia (though the acceptance of this region as an ancient centre of wild cereals depends on certain botanical assumptions not universally accepted); another primitive form, *Triticum monococcum*, is known wild from the Balkans through Asia Minor to North Syria and the borders of Kurdistan and Persia. It is clear that the appreciation of the possibilities of grass seeds as a foodstuff which might be gathered, even if not cultivated at first, would be likely to be gained by the ancient hunting groups who inhabited these areas, and that communities, assured of a grain crop at least, could be formed once the potentialities of deliberate sowing and harvesting were grasped. Grain crops can have more than one use: man cannot live by bread alone, and fermented beer can be made from most cereals, and is likely to be as old as agriculture. To the mind of primitive man, it may be as important as the food crop - tribes in Northern Rhodesia were found, when Europeans first visited them, to endure an annual food shortage rather than encroach upon the grain set aside for beer!