Traces of First Farmers Found in Jordan

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK—Tobias Richter of the University of Copenhagen and his team have found the 14,000-year-old bones of a child and an adult and evidence of early farming in Jordan’s Black Desert. “It’s really startling new evidence that we didn’t expect to find in this particular part of southwest Asia. And it changes the way in which we think about these hunter-gatherer communities at the end of the last Ice Age, who were on the brink of developing these new technologies of agriculture, these new ways of life that are influencing us still today,” he told Euro News. At that time, the region received enough rain to sustain the growth of an early human settlement. “We can then identify different species of plants, which in turn will tell us what sorts of things were growing out here. It’s hard to imagine right now because it’s all desert, but back many, many years ago, it was actually really nice and very, very green, and we can tell that from these plant remains,” explained finds co-ordinator Erin Estrup. To read about a mysterious structure in Jordan that made a Top 10 Discoveries list, go to “Neolithic Community Centers.”