Broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) is not one of the founder crops domesticated in Southwest Asia in the early Holocene, but was domesticated in northeast China by 6000 BC. In Europe, millet was ...reported in Early Neolithic contexts formed by 6000 BC, but recent radiocarbon dating of a dozen 'early' grains cast doubt on these claims. Archaeobotanical evidence reveals that millet was common in Europe from the 2nd millennium BC, when major societal and economic transformations took place in the Bronze Age. We conducted an extensive programme of AMS-dating of charred broomcorn millet grains from 75 prehistoric sites in Europe. Our Bayesian model reveals that millet cultivation began in Europe at the earliest during the sixteenth century BC, and spread rapidly during the fifteenth/fourteenth centuries BC. Broomcorn millet succeeds in exceptionally wide range of growing conditions and completes its lifecycle in less than three summer months. Offering an additional harvest and thus surplus food/fodder, it likely was a transformative innovation in European prehistoric agriculture previously based mainly on (winter) cropping of wheat and barley. We provide a new, high-resolution chronological framework for this key agricultural development that likely contributed to far-reaching changes in lifestyle in late 2nd millennium BC Europe.
The discovery of several 5000-year old seeds of wild watermelon, Citrullus lanatus, at an archaeological site Uan Muhuggiag in southwest Libya, re-opens the debate on the origin, wild distribution ...and domestication history of this species. The seeds were found within a plant assemblage of wild seeds and fruits, associated with pottery and bones of domestic animals belonging to Neolithic pastoralists. The presumed wild progenitor of the modern cultivar C. lanatus is today found exclusively in a region centring on the Kalahari Desert. This new archaeobotanical record raises the possibility that this distribution was much more extensive in the past.
Sorghum and millets are among the world's most important food crops and, for the inhabitants of the semi-arid tropics, they are the main sources of protein and energy. Little is known about the ...history of these crops; their domestication is thought to have occurred in the African savannah, but the date and precise location are unknown. Excavations at an early Holocene archaeological site in southernmost Egypt, 100 km west of Abu Simbel, have yielded hundreds of carbonized seeds of sorghum and millets, with consistent radiocarbon dates of 8,000 years before present (BP), thus providing the earliest evidence for the use of these plants. They are morphologically wild, but the lipid fraction of the sorghum grains shows a closer relationship to domesticated than to wild varieties. Whatever their domestic status, the use of these plants 8,000 years ago suggests that the African plant-food complex developed independently of the Levantine wheat and barley complex.
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