AGRICULTURE, the cultivation of plants for food and other ends, as opposed to the use of plants as they grow naturally in man's environment, is a rather recent phenomenon if considered relative to the time scale of the development of Homo sapiens. Scholars now agree in dating the most ancient archaeological traces of plant cultivation to the eighth or seventh millennium BCE and in indicating not the valleys of the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile, where the most ancient urban civilizations are attested, but the higher lands lying both west and east of Mesopotamia as the original cradles of agriculture. The Natufian culture of Palestine and other similar communities and cultural complexes in Kurdistan (Zawi Chemi Shanidar) and northern Iraq (Karim Shahir) used noncultivated (wild) wheat and barley.

The first traces of agriculture proper are found in sites such as Jericho (c. 7500 BCE), Jarmo (Iraqi Kurdistan), Tepe Sarab (Iranian Kurdistan...