Plant processing at the site, including the processing of wild cereals, may have had its own environmental effects.

The harvesting of wild cereals in quantities sufficient to feed large gatherings, over extended periods, would have exerted selection pressure on the wild plant populations in the area.

Preferential harvesting of specific plant characteristics — grain size, ease of harvest, resistance to shattering before harvest — is thought to be one of the mechanisms through which the unconscious early stages of plant domestication operated.

Whether such processes were operating at Göbekli Tepe in ways that contributed to the eventual domestication of cereals in the region is a question that requires more detailed archaeobotanical analysis to address.