Discovering the origin of civilisation is the holy grail of anthropology and archaeology. Essentially, this means understanding how man transformed from un-civilised Palaeolithic hunter gatherers to civilised Neolithic specialists dependent on agriculture. It used to be thought that agriculture itself was the key to this transition, as it enabled larger communities to settle in one place and develop the specialities that signal the arrival of civilisation. No longer was the desperate search for food an all-consuming activity that forced people to continually migrate like animals. And since agriculture is thought to have developed first in a region of the Near East known as the Fertile Crescent, around 10,000 to 11,000 years ago, the Fertile Crescent, it was believed, must hold
