Agriculture?

14,000-year-old bread was found in Jordan.

https://phys.org/news/2018-07-archaeologists-bread-predates-agriculture-years.html

I find it shocking that this seems to break the brains of academics who want to insist that humans were “primitive” until just about yesterday. The word “agriculture” seems to only apply to organized plant growth that happens in large permanent settlements, but we know that right here in Southern California, hunter-gatherers were always cultivating oak tree gardens and agave fields. That is, in fact, agriculture. And such behavior definitely pre-dates the arrival of corn, which everyone always claims sparked the advent of agriculture in the Southwest.

Humans haven’t been truly primitive for at least 40,000 years when people were making jewelry, flutes and 3-dimensional paintings. Even as far back as 2 million years ago Naledi man was practicing ritual burial.

In order to better understand ourselves we need to change the prism through which we look at the “ancients” and understand how much they were like us. Realize that the hunter-gatherers of the American Southwest were extremely modern people on the human timeline, with complex societies and traditions. The only real “advance” we’ve made in the last few thousand years is to separate ourselves from the natural world to the extent that it seems inconceivable to some (usually stubborn old-think academics) that humans always worked with the earth in rational human ways and made choices about how to live — no matter how “primitive” they may appear to “modern” eyes.