Have you ever been talking to a creationist, who knows that
agriculture only began about 10,000 years ago, say something
like, "What were we doing for all those tens of thousands of
years before then? Why didn't we settle down sooner?" I did not
know the answer to this, until now. Via ScienceDaily: Until
recently researchers say the story of the origin of agriculture
was one of a relatively sudden appearance of plant cultivation
in the Near East around 10,000 years ago spreading quickly into
Europe and dovetailing conveniently with ideas about how quickly
language and population genes spread from the Near East to
Europe. Initially, genetics appeared to support this idea but
now cracks are beginning to appear in the evidence underpinning
that model Now a team led by Dr Robin Allaby from the University
of Warwick have developed a new mathematical model that shows
how plant agriculture actually began much earlier than first
thought, well before the Younger Dryas (the last “big freeze”
with glacial conditions in