Bread wheat was first domesticated in multiple places at once
An 8,000-year-old fingerprint preserved in a lump of Georgian clay has overturned the long-held belief that farming began in a single, isolated garden of Eden.
Archaeologists recently uncovered a thumbnail-sized clay imprint in the Republic of Georgia that preserves the distinct ridges and texture of a wheat grain from 6,000 BCE. For decades, the established narrative of human history claimed that agriculture was a singular spark that ignited in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East before slowly spreading outward. This tiny artifact proves otherwise, revealing that the people of the Caucasus were independently perfecting the art of bread wheat cultivation at the same time as their neighbors hundreds of miles to the south.
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