The region around Upper Mesopotamia, southeastern Anatolia, and the Levant is where the wild ancestors of the first domesticated crops — einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, barley, lentils, chickpeas, and other species — were first brought under cultivation, and where the first domestic animals were bred.

The process of domestication was not a sudden discovery or a single event but a long, uneven transition that involved the gradual modification of human behavior toward more active management and eventually cultivation of specific plant and animal species.

This process began broadly during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic and accelerated through the subsequent millennia.

By roughly 8,000 BCE, communities in multiple parts of the Fertile Crescent were genuinely agricultural in the sense of depending primarily on cultivated crops and herded animals for their subsistence.

The communities that built Göbekli Tepe in its major phases were, as far as the evidence shows, still primarily dependent on wild resources — hunting, gathering, and fishing — though they may have been experimenting with or beginning to manage wild plant species.