An overwhelming body of archaeological evidence suggests that people first began farming around 9500 b.c. in the Fertile Crescent, which stretches from the Arabian Gulf to the Mediterranean. But scholars are still uncertain how agriculture spread across the rest of Asia. The ancient village of Mehrgarh in Pakistan, which is one of the few extensive early Neolithic sites east of the Fertile Crescent to have been excavated, has loomed large in this debate. Archaeologists who dug at the site in the 1970s believed the settlement dated to 8000 b.c. This is far earlier than any other Neolithic site lying between it and the Fertile Crescent, suggesting that people in what is now Pakistan may have developed agriculture independently. “Mehrgarh always stood out as a unique site,” says archaeologist Benjamin Mutin of Sorbonne University.
Recently, Mutin and geochemist Antoine Zazzo of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris led a team that used new methods of radiocarbon dating to analyze tooth enamel from 23 Neolithic people buried at Mehrgarh. They determined that the earliest remains date to around 5000 b.c., suggesting that the settlement was likely founded by people who came from the west, where agriculture was by then well established. “This is the way science is supposed to work,” says Zazzo. “You reinvestigate important sites with new methods and arrive at more precise results.” The descendants of these farmers went on to domesticate the zebu, a breed of cattle native to South Asia distinguished by a prominent hump over its shoulders. A clay figure depicting a zebu is one of many distinctive figurines archaeologists have unearthed at Mehrgarh.
