The Cradle of Agriculture

Abstract

It has long been debated exactly where and when crops were first domesticated and farming began--events that directly contributed to the emergence of Western civilization. In their Perspective, Lev-Yadun and colleagues discuss botanical, genetic and archeological evidence suggesting that the cradle of agriculture lay within a small region of the Fertile Crescent (in what is now southeastern Turkey/ northern Syria) and began in the 7th millennium B.C.