PERSPECTIVES T

he origins of agriculture have been the source of much speculation, but recent discoveries are enabling archaeologists to piece together a more accurate picture. Fifty years ago, the earliest known farming village was Jericho in the southern Levant, dated to about 11,000 years ago ( 1). Since then, a series of sites dated hundreds of years earlier has been found in an arc extending to northern Iraq. Discoveries in Iran at Chogha Golan and Sheikh-e Abad ( 2), dated to 11,700 years ago, extend the arc to Iran, allowing fi ve clusters of sites to be defi ned (see the fi gure, panel A). Archaeological excavations in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains of Iran reported by Riehl et al. on page 65 of this issue ( 3) pro-vide evidence that wild cereal cultivation in the eastern cluster occurred almost as early as in the clusters farther west. The emerging evidence shows that cultiva-tion began at more or less the same time in all fi ve clusters, but that the crops were dif-ferent from one cluster to another. This pat-tern has been established at 11 sites dated to between 11,500 and 11,000 years ago, includ-ing Chogha Golan in the Zagros Mountains, where charred cereals were recovered in asso-ciation with arable weeds ( 4). At this time, the inhabitants of these sites were not yet herders but continued to hunt large game, aurochs, gazelle, sheep, goat, and equids. At some sites, cultivation of wild cereals occurred on a large scale, as demonstrated by discoveries of storage structures ( 5), installa-tions with multiple querns (see the fi gure, pan-els C and D), and massive quantities of cereal chaff used to temper daub for construction ( 6). Imposing architecture has been unearthed, sometimes consisting of spectacular commu-nal buildings, but with different styles in each cluster ( 7). The earliest known rectangular buildings were constructed during the early Holocene, all previous buildings being circu-lar. Long-distance transportation of rare raw materials took place; obsidian, marine shells, bitumen, ochre, and chlorite (a stone used for carving) have been found on sites far from their sources, indicating contact between clusters. Cultural and agricultural developments during the early Holocene differed strongly from one cluster to another, as recent fi nd