Earliest direct evidence for broomcorn millet and wheat in the central Eurasian steppe region

Michael David Frachetti, Robert Nicholas Spengler, Gayle J. Fritz, Alexei Mar'yashev

2010

Data confidence 85 high

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Abstract

Before 3000 BC, societies of western Asia were cultivating wheat and societies of China were cultivating broomcorn millet; these are early nodes of the world's agriculture. The authors are searching for early cereals in the vast lands that separate the two, and report a breakthrough at Begash in south-east Kazakhstan. Here, high precision recovery and dating have revealed the presence of both wheat and millet in the later third millennium BC. Moreover the context, a cremation burial, raises the suggestion that these grains might signal a ritual rather than a subsistence commodity.