The Secrets of Spirit Cave

Archaeologists long ago concluded that man first began to farm around 7500 B.C. in the Middle East's Fertile Crescent. Other excavations have shown that he also acquired agricultural skills at roughly the same time in what is now Mexico and Central America. More recent discoveries by members of a University of Hawaii expedition in northern Thailand may well push the birth of agriculture even farther back. The Thai evidence suggests that peoples of Southeast Asia tilled the soil more than 2,000 years before anyone began to farm in the Middle East or the Americas.

Old Chestnuts. Clues to the existence of the ancient Asian farmers first came to light in 1965 when Chester Gorman, a Hawaii graduate student, poked into a cavern called Spirit Cave by the Thais: it had served as home for untold generations of farmers and was filled with relics of their handiwork. In a thorough excavation the expedition has since found crude Stone Age tools and a number of ancient seeds--peas, beans, cucumbers and Chinese water chestnuts --of a size and type that indicate that they were grown by man.

Using radioactive dating methods based on the decay of the isotope carbon 14, scientists have estimated the seeds to be as much as 11,700 years old; the same tests on ancient grain samples found in the Middle East or Latin America show that none are more than 9,500 years old. Thus, says the director of the University of Hawaii expedition. Anthropologist Wilhelm G. Solheim II. Thailand's ancient inhabitants may well have been the world's first farmers.

Early Rice. Other scientists suggest that agriculture developed more or less simultaneously in widely separated regions of the world. Carbon-14 dating techniques, they note, can easily be off by as much as 1,000 years. But Solheim's claim is at least indirectly supported by other evidence of Southeast Asia's prehistoric culture. At the historic Thai village of Non Nok Tha, another University of Hawaii archaeological team has discovered a 3,500-year-old metal ax with a socket for a handle. The unusual implement may show that Thailand's ancient people were able to make tools as sophisticated as those of their Middle Eastern contemporaries, and were probably working with bronze at least 1,000 years before the Chinese--who were previously thought to have taught them the skill.

The Non Nok Tha team also discovered old pottery fragments imprinted with rice husk markings. The shards indicate that the inhabitants of the region were cultivating rice even earlier than 3500 B.C.--long before it was grown in either India or China. "The Chinese," says Solheim. "have felt superior to the peoples beyond their borders. Now they will have to accept the fact that many of the peoples of Southeast Asia had a higher culture from which the Chinese borrowed for the foundations of their later civilization.''

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