The first societies in the world to abandon hunter-gathering and replace it with agriculture were found in the Near East around 8000–6000 BC. Similar developments occurred independently in China, and later in Mesoamerica, southeast Asia, Africa and India. It was in the Near East that the "most important developments in early farming" occurred in the Levant and the mountains surrounding what is now Syria, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Iran and Iraq. These areas already had rich ecological variation that was being exploited by hunter-gatherers in the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods.