SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

Oldest Known Granaries Found Near Dead Sea

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

More than 1,000 years before humans began domesticating grains for food, they were building sophisticated storage buildings to hold the wild grains they were cultivating, researchers reported Monday.

Collecting large quantities of grains and other foods is a prerequisite to establishing sizable communities, but such collection requires a system to store the perishables so they can be kept for months at least.

The new find reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences represents the oldest known storage system or granary to date -- about 11,300 years old. The earliest known domestication of cereal grains was thought to have occurred about 10,500 years ago.