New radiocarbon dates and Late Palaeolithic diet at Wadi Kubbaniya, Egypt by Professor Fred Wendorf, et al.
Vegetable remains are a rarity in Palaeolithic contexts.
These new determinations on material from southern Egypt establish securely the date of an intensive grass-tuber and fish economy in the Nile Valley towards 20,000 years ago. Because of the potential significance of this discovery, a major effort was made in 1981-4 to recover more remains of food plants, particularly cereals. Flotation could not be used for plant recovery because most of the remains were extremely fragile and disintegrated on contact with water. Instead, several hundred cubic metres of dry sediment were processed through specially constructed sets of graded screens. Some of the barley grains were blackish in colour, but neither they nor the date-stones were actually charred.