<P> Localised climate change is the favoured explanation for the origins of agriculture in the Levant . When major climate change took place after the last ice age (c. 11,000 BC), much of the earth became subject to long dry seasons . These conditions favoured annual plants which die off in the long dry season, leaving a dormant seed or tuber . An abundance of readily storable wild grains and pulses enabled hunter - gatherers in some areas to form the first settled villages at this time . </P> <P> Early people began altering communities of flora and fauna for their own benefit through means such as fire - stick farming and forest gardening very early . Exact dates are hard to determine, as people collected and ate seeds before domesticating them, and plant characteristics may have changed during this period without human selection . An example is the semi-tough rachis and larger seeds of cereals from just after the Younger Dryas (about 9,500 BC) in the early Holocene in the Levant region of the Fertile Crescent . Monophyletic characteristics were attained without any human intervention, implying that apparent domestication of the cereal rachis could have occurred quite naturally . </P> <P> Agriculture began independently in different parts of the globe, and included a diverse range of taxa . At least 11 separate regions of the Old and New World were involved as independent centers of origin . Some of the earliest known domestications were of animals . Pigs were domesticated in Mesopotamia around 13,000 BC . Sheep were domesticated in Mesopotamia between 11,000 and 9,000 BC . Cattle were domesticated from the wild aurochs in the areas of modern Turkey and Pakistan around 8,500 BC . Camels were domesticated late, perhaps around 3,000 BC . </P> <P> It was not until after 9,500 BC that the eight so - called founder crops of agriculture appear: first emmer and einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax . These eight crops occur more or less simultaneously on Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) sites in the Levant, although wheat was the first to be grown and harvested on a significant scale . At around the same time (9400 BC), parthenocarpic fig trees were domesticated . </P>

One of the developments of the agricultural societies was the