Neolithic Neophytes

An overwhelming body of archaeological evidence suggests that people first began farming around 9500 b.c. in the Fertile Crescent, which stretches from the Arabian Gulf to the Mediterranean. But scholars are still uncertain how agriculture spread across the rest of Asia. The ancient village of Mehrgarh in Pakistan, which is one of the few extensive early Neolithic sites east of the Fertile Crescent to have been excavated, has loomed large in this debate. Archaeologists who dug at the site in the