Jericho figs may be the first farmed crop
The New Stone Age began about 12,000 years ago when West Asian foragers turned wild cereals into fields. In a Jericho house dated 9400 BC, mutant figs that cannot be insect-pollinated suggest cuttings—and with them the invention of cultivation itself.
Neolithic closes the Stone Age in Asia, Europe, and Africa from roughly 10,000 to 2,000 BC, carrying the Neolithic Revolution's independent regional starts. It begins about 12,000 years ago with farming in Epipalaeolithic West Asia and Mesopotamia; in West Asia it lasts until the Chalcolithic around 4500 BC. Egypt runs to the Protodynastic about 3150 BC; China and Scandinavia to about 2000 BC. ASPRO chronology places Levantine beginnings near 10,200 BC out of Natufian culture; Natufian or proto-Neolithic spans 12,500 to 9,500 BC and overlaps Pre-Pottery Neolithic A.
Fertile Crescent founder crops were wheat, lentil, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch, and flax; rice and millet mattered elsewhere, usually domesticated once with wild ancestors still nearby. Early farming kept dogs and a narrow plant set including einkorn, millet, and spelt; by about 8000 BC sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs joined. Not every trait arrived in order—West Asian pioneers farmed before pottery—and Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia built distinct packages. Anatolian farmers drew ancestry from local hunter-gatherers, implying adoption in place rather than only demic replacement.
PPNA from about 10,000 BC includes Göbekli Tepe around 9500 BC, a temple zone without nearby permanent houses, likely raised by nomadic hunters. True farming advances: emmer domestication, herding, flour from ground grain. The 2006 Jericho figs—a sterile mutant needing cuttings—may mark farming's first technology. Stone tools stayed central even as villages rewrote human density.
Source: Neolithic
