Translations:Kashmiri cuisine/11/en

Neolithic culture

Even before the Megalithic culture that followed the Neolithic period, there is evidence of wheat, barley and lentil cultivation. Clear evidence for agriculture in the form of large domestic storages of grain and rachises of wheat and barley, as well as millets, were found after 2500 BC in Qasim Bagh in Kashmir. The Kashmir Valley contains multiple sites of the so-called Northern Neolithic, possibly dating as early as 3000 BC when climate became warmer. Excavations from Pethpuran Teng suggest a wider network of contact of this early population, and a significantly deeper time transition of broom-corn millets across the Inner Asian mountains. The date range returned from the lentil samples at Pethpuran Tang represent one of the earliest dated pulse crops from the region (c. 2700 BC). While the valley is altitudinally comparable to other inter-montane agro-pastoralist sites in Central Asia, Kashmir's slightly lower latitude presented the valley as a geographic threshold where crops could be grown without the necessary introgression of traits allowing their cultivation in higher and more northerly regions.