The period when humans stopped hunting and gathering and settled down to become farmers is one of the most important in history. It ranks with the original human exodus from Africa about 60,000 years ago, which led to Homo sapiens becoming a global species, and the beginning of the industrial revolution, 250 years ago, when many people stopped being farmers and began to earn their livings in other ways. Yet it is not well understood. A piece of research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, and Bill Finlayson of the Council for British Research in the Levant, may shed more light on the matter.

Dr Kuijt and Dr Finlayson have been excavating a site called Dhra, in Jordan, near the Dead Sea. They have uncovered evidence that sophisticated ways of storing grain had been developed well before cereals were actually domesticated. The discoveries the two researchers describe appear to be small granaries, about three metres across and three high. They are made of mud, in some cases reinforced by stone. But, being over 11,000 years old, they predate the domestication of cereals in the Middle East by a millennium. Instead, they seem to have been used to store wild barley and wild oats.

The period leading up to the domestication of cereals was one of erratic climate change, as the last ice age ended. In the Middle East people started to build settlements as early as 15,000 years ago, a period called the Early Natufian, but a drying of the climate made them nomadic again between 12,800 and 11,500 years ago. A second attempt to settle, known to archaeologists as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, then began and led, arguably, to modernity - at least in the West.

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