THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT OF THE NUCLEAR NEAR EAST
The more we learn of this hilly-flanks zone that I describe, the more it seems surely to have been a nuclear area. This is where we archeologists need, and are beginning to get, the help of natural scientists. They are coming to the conclusion that the natural environment of the hilly-flanks zone today is much as it was some eight to ten thousand years ago. There are still two kinds of wild wheat and a wild barley, and the wild sheep, goat, and pig. We have discovered traces of each of these at about nine thousand years ago, also traces of wild ox, horse, and dog, each of which appears to be the probable ancestor of the domesticated form. In fact, at about nine thousand years ago, the two wheats, the barley, and at least the goat, were already well on the road to domestication.
The wild wheats give us an interesting clue. They are only available together with the wild barley within the hilly-flanks zone. While the wild barley grows in a variety of elevations and beyond the zone, at least one of the wild wheats does not seem to grow below the hill country. As things look at the moment, the domestication of both the wheats together could only have taken place within the hilly-flanks zone. Barley seems to have first come into cultivation due to its presence as a weed in already cultivated wheat fields. There is also a suggestion—there is still much more to learn in the matter—that the animals which were first domesticated were most at home up in the hilly-flanks zone in their wild state.
With a single exception—that of the dog—the earliest positive evidence of domestication includes the two forms of wheat, the barley, and the goat. The evidence comes from within the hilly-flanks zone. However, it comes from a settled village proper, Jarmo (which I’ll describe in the next chapter), and is thus from the era of the primary village-farming community. We are still without positive evidence of domesticated grain and animals in the first era of the food-producing stage, that of incipient cultivation and animal domestication.