ABSTRACT
No one knows when hunter-gatherers first settled on the shores of the Persian Gulf, which, during the late Ice Age, was a large river estuary. One school of thought believes that, as sea levels rose after 15,000 years ago, the gulf spread far up into what is now southern Iraq, perhaps creating coastal and riverside marshlands rich in fish and plant foods. The ancient coastlines of the early and middle Holocene now lie below many feet of river alluvium and sand, as does the archaeological record of potential early occupation. As the climate dried up during the Holocene, goes this argument, forager populations tended to concentrate in more resource-rich areas. As elsewhere in western Asia, it may have been in such locations that people first experimented with growing cereal grains. Within a few thousand years, farming villages clustered along river banks and betterwatered areas of the desert.
