Revealing the plant protein components of diets before farming through archaeobotany, experimental archaeology and biomolecules

The development of agriculture 11,000 years ago in Southwest Asia fundamentally transformed human societies and their relationships with plants and landscapes, often portrayed as arising from the increasingly intensive use of starch-rich grasses. Plant-Pro challenges current understandings of the transition from foraging to farming through its deep-time focus on changes to the use of protein-rich plants by early humans (Neanderthals and Homo sapiens). A new reliance on protein-rich plants, achieved through novel forms of cooking and food preparation, provides evidence for previously undocumented adaptations to major shifts in the environmental availability of wild food resources. The deep-time perspective adopted by Plant-Pro will document the development of plant management strategies in the periods preceding the dawn of farming, and open new avenues of scientific research into plant dietary proteins predating the transformations in culinary cultures traditionally associated with the so-called agricultural revolution. The project will employ proven analytical methods integrating archaeobotany with experimental archaeology, biomolecular techniques (isotopes, biomarkers, organic residues), and sedimentary DNA. Its main outcome will be a new set of baseline referents and integrative methods for detecting early plant cooking and food preparation, and its crucial role in human evolution, which will have wide application beyond the project. These methods will be refined and tested on three archaeological sites in the northern Zagros of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq containing well-preserved plant remains from securely dated contexts spanning the Middle Palaeolithic, Upper Palaeolithic and Epipalaeolithic periods.u