A remarkable lakeside camp
Ohalo II, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, preserved huts, grinding tools and an exceptional plant assemblage from roughly 23,000 years ago. The site shows intensive use of wild cereals thousands of years before Neolithic farming.
The proto-weed clue
Researchers identified plants that thrive in disturbed, cultivated ground alongside cereals. Combined with sickle-like use traces and cereal processing, the pattern was argued to fit small-scale cultivation rather than gathering alone.
What it does not prove
The cereals were still morphologically wild. There is no evidence that Ohalo II was a permanent farming village with fully domesticated crops, fields managed across many generations or a Neolithic food economy.
Why the distinction matters
If trial cultivation occurred this early, agriculture was not a single invention switched on at the start of the Neolithic. It was a long behavioural spectrum involving gathering, landscape disturbance, tending, sowing and eventually domestication.
Research record
Snir et al. (2015), PLOS ONE — cultivation and proto-weeds at Ohalo IIPeer-reviewed · open sourceNadel et al. — The use of stone at Ohalo IIPeer-reviewed · open sourceDid People Cultivate Cereals During the Ice Age?
Direct answer: People at Ohalo II clearly harvested and processed wild cereals; published evidence also supports possible small-scale cultivation around 23,000 years ago, but not full agriculture.
The site pushes plant management deep into the Late Pleistocene. It is best read as an early cultivation experiment, not an Ice Age farming civilisation.