ABSTRACT
This work has posed the question of why and how permanent settlement, husbandry, and cities developed where and when they did. Answer was given in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, beginning with the environmental shifts consequent upon the ending of the last Ice Age. In those increasingly permissive conditions of the Holocene Near East, it was indicated that for the very first time Homo sapiens sapiens was present to take advantage of an interglacial. But the ending of glacial conditions was itself destabilizing. New adaptations had to be made in an environment that continued to flux differentially for millenniums after the nominal onset of the Holocene neothermal, reaching a temperature 2-3° higher than today’s between 5,000 and 3,000 BC, while tree pollen climaxed at 3,500 BC in the Zagros (Bottema 1978:25). It is only about this time that near-modern sea-levels were being attained in the Gulf (Larsen and Evans 1978:236). Some idea of the scale and suddenness of the adaptations that had to be made at the Epipalaeolithic can be gained from the fact that the maximum of the last, Würm, Ice Age was reached only around 21, 000 years BP, with sea-level declining about 100 metres (Nützel 1975:104). Regional conditions over this transition are conveniently summarized in Map 11.1.
