Canada: Crop of ‘Indian potato’ discovered in British Columbia could be world’s oldest garden

Archaeologists have uncovered what could be the world’s oldest surviving garden, built by hunter-gatherers. In between stalking animals and fishing for dinner, it seems our fierce ancestors were discovering the joys of their own vegetable patch. The evidence is a 3,800-year-old garden in British Columbia, Canada with its own rock wall, wooden digging tools and the remains of a crop known as the ‘Indian potato’. Thousands of years before Alan Titchmarsh and the many gardening tips on television and in books, the techniques used in the late Holocene period were surprisingly similar to those used now, according to the findings. Hunter-gatherers may not have had trowels, but they figured out how to make their own wooden digging sticks, with fire-hardened ends. More