Geoscience Reference
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phases about 14,000 years ago, and was not observed in some regions. The fi rst
embryo of agriculture appeared in Older
Dryas
when the tribe experimenting with
seeds had more chances to survive than the classical hunters and gatherers. The
embryonic news spread in Fertile Crescent, and the simple agricultural discoveries
were kept at least partly alive during the next warming stage. They were “discov-
ered” again as an effi cient tool in the fi ght against the much harder hit of cooling in
Younger
Dryas
(12,800-11,700 years ago). It seems entirely natural that these fi rst
steps in discovering advantages of agriculture were practiced on more fertile soils.
The climate was characterized by long dry seasons in today's mild zone. The dry-
ness favored annual plants which die off in the long-lasting dry season leaving dor-
mant seeds for the new birth in the next year. These plants put more energy into
production of seeds than into strong body and woody growth. The abundance of
wild grains contributed to the extension of the starting agriculture, all happening
within 1,000 years or more. We must conclude that agriculture is characterized as a
coevolutionary adaptation of
Homo
and plants under the provision of recognizing
the fertile soil. Accompanied by wildlife, this coevolutionary process was started
with the domestication of plants on fertile soils within favorable environments and
completed with the gradual domestication of suitable animals.
Thus far, all of our statements in Sect.
12.3
are mainly hypothetical regarding the
appreciation of soil quality. Our statements lack direct confi rmation and could be
rejected on the basis of more facts from solid archeological fi ndings. We know that
even the hunters and gatherers were not aimlessly wandering across the countryside.
Members of a big family or a small tribe were occupying an area up to about 100 km
2
within which they were moving according to an inherited system, either visiting the
places in shape of arrows directed from one center or wandering in a spiral. They
were protecting their own area from wild incursions, since they knew well the
advantages of the soil they protected from wild nomads. With the start of agricul-
ture, those earlier-mentioned centers were gradually transformed into permanent
settlements, and the protection of fertile soils was transformed into organized sys-
tems. Here, we have been describing the situation on our Fertile Crescent. But simi-
lar archeological fi ndings were discovered in Chinese Diatonghuan and Xianrendong,
and due to the infl uence of Younger
Dryas
, the original nomads gradually changed
their style to settlement after fi rst fi nding the best fi tting soils for rye
domestication.
But let us shift from indirect documents to real proofs formulated upon the prin-
ciple
litera scripta manet verbum ut inane perit
: “The written letter remains, as the
empty
word
perishes.” Here we replace
word
by
hypothesis.
We start with hiero-
glyphs written in old Egypt. The fertile soils in the valley of the river Nile originated
on alluvial deposits of the river. The soils were regularly “fertilized” each year by
the Nile fl oods rich in suspended soil particles and dissolved products of weathering
mainly from the upper part of Blue Nile. The name
kemet (kmt)
of those soils was
translated as black land. The importance of the
kemet
soil is obvious from the fact
that the name of old Egypt starting from pre-pharaonic past or the predynastic
period was identical with the name for the Nile's fertile valley soils. In contrast,
deshret
was the term for the reddish desert soil surrounding
kemet. Deshret
was the
