First Saharan farming started over 10,000 years ago

People in Saharan Africa started cultivating and storing wild cereals 10,000 years ago, according to a study which shows that hunter-gatherers developed an early form of agriculture by harvesting and storing crops.

The research may also be a lesson for the future, if global warming leads to a necessity for alternative crops.

Researchers from University of Huddersfield in the UK and the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy have been investigating findings from an ancient rock shelter at a site named Takarkori in south-western Libya.

It is desert now, but in the Holocene age, some 10,000 years ago, it was part of the "green Sahara" and wild cereals grew there. More than 200,000 seeds - in small circular concentrations - were discovered at Takarkori, which showed that hunter-gatherers developed an early form of agriculture by harvesting and storing crops.

However, an alternative possibility was that ants, which are capable of moving seeds, had been responsible for the concentrations.

Researchers showed that insects were not responsible and this supports the hypothesis of human activity in collection and storage of the seeds.

The research provided the first-known evidence of storage and cultivation of cereal seeds in Africa. The site has yielded other key discoveries, including the vestiges of a basket, woven from roots, that could have been used to gather the seeds.

Also, chemical analysis of pottery from the site demonstrates that cereal soup and cheese were being produced.

Researchers found that although the wild cereals, harvested by the people of the Holocene Sahara, are defined as "weeds" in modern agricultural terms, they could be an important food of the future.

"The same behaviour that allowed these plants to survive in a changing environment in a remote past makes them some of the most likely possible candidates as staple resources in a coming future of global warming," researchers said.

"They continue to be successfully exploited and cultivated in Africa today and are attracting the interest of scientists searching for new food resources," they added.