Evidence of First Peoples cultivating wild foods
"According to Geordon Omand of the Canadian Press, road building crews near Pitt Meadows, about 20 miles from Vancouver, came upon a 450-square-foot platform made of flat stones packed tightly into single and double layers. Archeologists called in to assess the site determined that it was a wetland wapato garden. In the past, the area was covered in shallow water and silt. The stone platform was constructed to prevent the tubers from rooting too deep, making it easier to pull them out of the muck."Lizzie Wade at Science reports that researchers pulled up 4,000 wapato tubers from the platform, as well as pieces of 150 wooden digging tools, carved into shapes similar to a trowel. Those materials were dated to around 1,800 BC making the site roughly 3,800 years old and the oldest evidence of people cultivating wild foods in that area of North America.
By the way, this is at about the same time as Amenemhet III was Pharaoh of the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt. His reign is regarded as the golden age of the Middle Kingdom. It is also around the time that the horse was domesticated. And the beginning of alphabetic writing (as opposed to hieroglyphs),
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