The Near Eastern Neolithic is of enormous culture-historical significance. Although Neolithic ‘revolutions’ also occurred in several other regions of the world, the Near Eastern Neolithic was both the earliest and eventually had the most far-reaching impact on the global development of humanity due to the domestication of a comparatively productive suite of domesticated plants and animals that allowed for a swift and vast expansion of agriculture outside the Near East.

After hundreds of thousands of years during which human groups obtained their nourishment from a combination of hunting, gathering, and fishing, and in which groups were, with a few exceptions, both small and mobile, the transition to a settlement-based existence founded on an agricultural economy in the Near East occurred within a relatively brief span of time that may not have lasted more than a few centuries.