Areni-1 Cave

After the melting of ice sheets of the Earth's last glacial age about 12,000 years ago, the rise of human civilization began in southwestern Asia. Along the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, i.e. in the Levant, and in the foothills of the southern slopes of the Eastern Taurus Mountains along the northern edge of Mesopotamia (modem southeastern Turkey), bands of hunters-gatherers built their first permanent settlements in areas especially rich in wild plants and game. Within a millennium or so they started experimenting with the domestication of plants and wild animals during the period conventionally known as the New Stone Age, or the Neolithic. The natural environment to the north of the Eastern Taurus Mountains was quite different. Here, all the way to the mountain chain of the Greater Caucasus that separates the Near East from the European steppes of what is now southern Russia, the terrain is fragmented by chains of high mountains and characterized by sharp fluctuations in altitudinal zonality.