<P> Once early farmers perfected their agricultural techniques like irrigation, their crops would yield surpluses that needed storage . Most hunter gatherers could not easily store food for long due to their migratory lifestyle, whereas those with a sedentary dwelling could store their surplus grain . Eventually granaries were developed that allowed villages to store their seeds longer . So with more food, the population expanded and communities developed specialized workers and more advanced tools . </P> <P> The process was not as linear as was once thought, but a more complicated effort, which was undertaken by different human populations in different regions in many different ways . </P> <P> Early agriculture is believed to have originated and become widespread in Southwest Asia around 10,000--9,000 BP, though earlier individual sites have been identified . The Fertile Crescent region of Southwest Asia is the centre of domestication for three cereals (einkorn wheat, emmer wheat and barley), four legumes (lentil, pea, bitter vetch and chickpea) and flax . The Mediterranean climate consists of a long dry season with a short period of rain, which may have favored small plants with large seeds, like wheat and barley . The Fertile Crescent also had a large area of varied geographical settings and altitudes and this variety may have made agriculture more profitable for former hunter - gatherers in this region in comparison with other areas with a similar climate . </P> <P> Finds of large quantities of seeds and a grinding stone at the paleolithic site of Ohalo II in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee, dated to around 19,400 BP has shown some of the earliest evidence for advanced planning of plant food consumption and suggests that humans at Ohalo II processed the grain before consumption . Tell Aswad is oldest site of agriculture with domesticated emmer wheat dated to 8800 BC . Soon after came hulled, two - row barley found domesticated earliest at Jericho in the Jordan valley and Iraq ed - Dubb in Jordan . Other sites in the Levantine corridor that show the first 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". The Heavy Neolithic Qaraoun culture has been identified at around fifty sites in Lebanon around the source springs of the River Jordan, however the dating of the culture has never been reliably determined . </P>

Where did the first neolithic farming villages appear