Transition to Cultivation in Central Asia 9200 BP

 Another discovery stereotypically depicted by the sensationalist media as "overturning the fixed narrative" 9,200-Year-Old Cave Find Challenges Theories on Farming’s Origins" Max Planck Institute of GeoanthropologySeptember 6, 2025

Excavations in Toda Cave in the Surkandarya Valley of southern Uzbekistan have yielded a material that indicates the roots of farming in the Old World extended far beyond Anatolia, North Africa and the Fertile Crescent. The interdisciplinary study of the results of this project reveals that by at least 9,200 years ago, communities as far north and east as southern Uzbekistan were also harvesting wild barley using sickle blades. This evidence was discovered by an international research team led by Xinying Zhou of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, working under the guidance of Farhad Maksudov, director of the Institute of Archaeology in Samarkand.

Excavation of the cave’s oldest layers produced stone tools, charcoal, and preserved plant remains. Archaeobotanical analysis, led by Robert Spengler of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, confirmed that the cave’s inhabitants gathered wild barley from nearby valleys. Other recovered plant remains included pistachio shells and apple seeds. Examination of the limestone tools and flakes revealed wear patterns consistent with cutting grasses and other plants—patterns that closely match those found at sites associated with early agricultural activity.

There are several problems with this type of journalistic narrative. Firstly grasses grow pretty widely all around the globe, and they have edible seeds. Lots of mammals survive on a basic diet of grass and grass Early hominids almost certainly was not ignorant to what could and could not be eaten in the environment surrounding them. So it is not really all that surprising to find evidence of the collection, storage, consuption, and perhaps even propagation of this resource. So evidence is known from the "Fertile Crescent" (the archaeology of which is a product of European colonialism, and then  imperialism in the area of the former Ottoman Empire), Southern Anatolia (Catal Huyuk and the Tas Tepeler sites), quite a lot of sites right across North Africa (Sahara, Maghreb) that tend not to be noticed that much in the anglophone literature. Quite a lot of these sites are associated with hilly regions (and caves) so its not really all that surprising to see examples of sites producing such evidence to the east too. Probably it's fairly predictable where we could look for more in this part of the world. Its a matter of doing the fieldwork.   

Reference: “9,000-year-old barley consumption in the foothills of central Asia” by Xinying Zhou, Robert N. Spengler, Bahediyoh Sayfullaev, Khasanov Mutalibjon, Jian Ma, Junchi Liu, Hui Shen, Keliang Zhao, Guanhan Chen, Jian Wang, Thomas A. Stidham, Hai Xu, Guilin Zhang, Qingjiang Yang, Yemao Hou, Jiacheng Ma, Nasibillo Kambarov, Hongen Jiang, Farhod Maksudov, Steven Goldstein, Jianxin Wang, Dorian Q. Fuller and Xiaoqiang Li, 25 August 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2424093122.