The Last Glacial Maximum in the Jordanian desert

Southwest Asia is one of a number of areas worldwide in which there was an increase in the control and manipulation of plant and animal populations in the late Pleistocene, leading to full domestication of crops and livestock in the early Holocene. During the past 30 years a number of archaeological projects have examined this process and its environmental, demographic, and social background. Initially, most of these survey and excavation projects were undertaken in the present woodland and moist steppe vegetational zones that stretch in an arc from the Mediterranean coast to the Zagros range in western Iran (the ‘Fertile Crescent’): this being the recent habitat of a number of the domesticates.