Sickle wear shows hunter-gatherers managed wild grain 15,000 years ago

Archaeologists at the University of Haifa have found evidence that the Natufians, hunter-gatherers who lived in the Levant between about 15,000 and 12,000 years ago, harvested wild cereals in a deliberate and organised way thousands of years before domesticated crops appeared. The study, led by Dr. Iris Groman-Yaroslavski and published in Scientific Reports, was announced by the university and reported by JNS on 26 August 2026.

The team examined 158 flint sickle blades: 90 from the terrace of El-Wad Cave on Mount Carmel and 68 from the Salibiya I site in the Jordan Valley. Under microscopes at up to 200 times magnification, they studied the polish and wear left on each blade by cutting plants. To learn what the marks meant, they built 22 replica sickles and ran 17 harvesting experiments on wild grasses at different stages of ripeness in several parts of Israel.

Every ancient blade showed wear from cutting cereals, and about half had been used for a long time, some of them resharpened. The patterns indicate that harvesting began while the grain was half ripe and continued for several weeks into later stages. At El-Wad the two kinds of wear were roughly evenly split, while at Salibiya I about two thirds of the blades showed late-stage harvesting. Because cutting before the seeds fall naturally leaves some to regenerate, and some grain was probably kept for sowing, the researchers see this as an early form of cereal cultivation, though not yet farming. Groman-Yaroslavski said the Natufians also appear to have recognised which wild plants kept their grain longest.

The study involved University of Haifa colleagues including Prof. Mina Weinstein-Evron, Prof. Reuven Yeshurun and Prof. Daniel Kaufman, with researchers from the Hebrew University, Ben-Gurion University and the Israel Antiquities Authority. The Natufian period saw people settle in larger villages, store food and develop more sophisticated tools, setting the stage for the agricultural revolution.