section_path: Development and diffusion/Beginnings in the Levant
section_name: Beginnings in the Levant
paragraph_text: Beginnings in the Levant
  
  Agriculture appeared first in Southwest Asia about 2,000 years later, around 10,000–9,000 years ago. The region was the centre of domestication for three cereals (einkorn wheat, emmer wheat and barley), four legumes (lentil, pea, bitter vetch and chickpea), and flax. Domestication was a slow process that unfolded across multiple regions, and was preceded by centuries if not millennia of pre-domestication cultivation.
  
  Finds of large quantities of seeds and a grinding stone at the Epipalaeolithic site of Ohalo II, dating to around 19,400 BP, has shown some of the earliest evidence for advanced planning of plants for food consumption and suggests that humans at Ohalo II processed the grain before consumption. Tell Aswad is the oldest site of agriculture, with domesticated emmer wheat dated to 10,800 BP. Soon after came hulled, two-row barley – found domesticated earliest at Jericho in the Jordan valley and at Iraq ed-Dubb in Jordan.
  
  Other sites in the Levantine corridor that show early evidence of agriculture include Wadi Faynan 16 and Netiv Hagdud. Jacques Cauvin noted that the settlers of Aswad did not domesticate on site, but "arrived, perhaps from the neighbouring Anti-Lebanon, already equipped with the seed for planting". In the Eastern Fertile Crescent, evidence of cultivation of wild plants has been found in Choga Gholan in Iran dated to 12,000 BP, with domesticated emmer wheat appearing in 9,800 BP, suggesting there may have been multiple regions in the Fertile Crescent where cereal domestication evolved roughly contemporaneously. The Heavy Neolithic Qaraoun culture has been identified at around fifty sites in Lebanon around the source springs of the River Jordan, but never reliably dated.
  
  In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond argues that the vast continuous east–west stretch of temperate climatic zones of Eurasia and North Africa gave peoples living there a highly advantageous geographical location that afforded them a head start in the Neolithic Revolution. Both shared the temperate climate ideal for the first agricultural settings, both were near a number of easily domesticable plant and animal species. In areas where continents aligned north–south such as the Americas and Africa, crops—and later domesticated animals—could not spread across tropical zones.