It appears that some time as early as 13,000 years ago the Natufians started to selectively collect the better grains of wheat and plant them for succeeding crops, so they probably became the first farming community in the West, raising wheat rather than relying on nature alone. Notably this could well be roughly the same date as that for the first rice cultivation in the Yangtze region of China, and the horticultural developments in the coastal regions of East Asia. Interestingly the earliest permanent settlements tend to be found at the junctions of different environments, giving potentially greater diversity of resources year round. Examples would be the edge of the steppe or the margins of flood plain and woods.

The Natufians were followed by a tribe called the Khiamian between 11,600 and 10,300 years ago. These early Neolithic people living in the Ghab Valley were burning wood for charcoal and clearing parts of the forest. They gradually expanded into South Levant. Around 11,500 years ago the weather started becoming warmer and wetter again. Wheat, which was now a highly domesticated Einkorn variety, had larger seeds on tougher stalks that needing threshing to release the seeds. This was followed by the domestication of lentils and peas, cultivated in North Syria (11,500 years ago) and Jericho (10,000 years ago). The main animal food sources up to about 11,000 years ago in South Levant were gazelle and deer, but from that date their numbers diminished in importance. Goats and sheep increased rapidly, indicating that man had taken to herding and tending (farming) animals and utilising their milk. These people developed larger villages than the Natufians, with houses built from sun-dried clay bricks, and they became farming communities. They also seem to have made fired clay ritual figurines. They eventually disappeared, again possibly due to climate pressures as there were severe droughts 8,500 and 6,000 years ago in South West Asia, the Nile region and Mediterranean Sudan, but farming communities had already begun to flourish in a number of areas such as Anatolia (present day Turkey) and Northern Iraq (Jarmo) around 10,000 years ago.

Pottery came much later to West Asia than China, as man had different pressures and development paths with regard to climate and food. In West Asia people ate baked bread from wheat, together with roasted meat and milk, so pottery was not as essential as it was for boiling rice and fish, the staple diet in East Asia. Pottery was discovered in this region several thousand years after the inception of agriculture. The earliest pottery in West Asia was probably produced about 10,600 years ago in West Anatolia.