THE WORLD ATLAS

Technology · c. 9500–8500 BCE

Farming begins

Jericho and the Fertile Crescent (southern Levant)

In the Fertile Crescent, people began cultivating wild cereals such as barley around 9500 BCE and settled in permanent villages like Jericho, founded beside a spring between about 9500 and 9000 BCE. Over the following one to two thousand years emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, lentils, peas, chickpeas, bitter vetch and flax became fully domesticated crops, and the region's wild sheep, goats, cattle and pigs became farm animals.

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Why it mattered

Farming fed far more people from the same land than hunting and gathering, making possible permanent villages, food surpluses, growing populations and, in time, towns, specialists and states.

Elsewhere

Farming was invented independently in several other places: rice and millet in China (rice domesticated between about 13,500 and 8,200 years ago), taro and yams at Kuk in New Guinea (perhaps from 8000 BCE), squash and maize in Mesoamerica (maize from about 7000 BCE), potatoes and manioc in South America, sorghum and pearl millet in Africa, and sunflowers and other seed plants in eastern North America (c. 2500 BCE).

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