This backdrop shows the first landscape shaped by the species: flat-roofed houses, cereals in rows, a goat between the buildings and fig trees at the edge.
Backdrop representing the first landscape shaped by the species: flat-roofed houses, cereals cultivated in rows, a domestic goat between the buildings and fig trees at the margin.
What the evidence shows
Each element is dated. Wild cereals are brought into cultivation in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, domestic-type chaff appearing in quantity only afterwards, which justifies the depiction of aligned rather than scattered ears. Goats are herded at Ganj Dareh, in the Zagros, around 8000 BCE, among the oldest attested flocks. The fig trees correspond to a precise discovery: several hundred dried and stored figs have been recovered from Early Neolithic villages of the southern Levant, about 11,200 years ago. Storage constitutes here the determining element, a preserved harvest allowing the interval between two production seasons to be crossed.
Bounds and conventions
A Near Eastern scene represents a band of global scope. Agriculture was invented independently in at least a dozen regions, and a first cultivated landscape in China, Mesoamerica or West Africa would differ from this one in cultivated species as in architecture.