The last Ice Age had ended, or more precisely was ending: the climate had been warming and shifting for several thousand years, and the glaciers that had dominated the northern latitudes were retreating.

The Younger Dryas, a sudden cold reversal that had interrupted the post-glacial warming roughly between 12,900 and 11,700 BCE, had itself ended.

The early Holocene, which began roughly 11,700 years before the present, brought with it the warmer and generally wetter climate conditions that made the Fertile Crescent one of the most biologically productive regions on earth.

This mattered enormously for the people who lived there.