48 cyprian broodbank
At this juncture, the Levantine overlap between the Mediterranean basin and the
Fertile Crescent proved decisive for future developments. Here, and on current
Mediterranean evidence only here, people began to experiment during the tenth to
eighth millennia bce with increasingly managed, and thereby eventually domesticated,
crops and animals (principally cereals, legumes and flax, plus sheep, goats, cattle and
pigs—an exceptionally wide spectrum of amenable local species on a comparative
global scale), as well as with the radically new social relations that permanent occupa-
tion in villages and sometimes much larger mega-sites entailed. Neolithic farming lifted
the demographic lid on already growing populations, and from a string of initial nuclei
often located in well-watered lowlands, such as at Jericho in the Jordan rift valley, a
versatile form of dry-farming spread across the Levant, onto the Anatolian plateau and,
during the ninth millennium, across the sea as a regularly re-supplied package, to
Cyprus. How farming expanded from east to west through the remainder of the
Mediterranean has long been a matter of contention between proponents of a model
of population expansion by farmers, and those who prefer adoption in situ by the
warm-weather hunter-gatherers who continued to occupy the vast majority of the
basin over the decisive millennia in the Levant. What is clear is that whether or not
originally Levantine-derived farming served to truncate potential future local
Mediterranean domestications, such incipient processes were not visibly afoot by the
seventh and early sixth millennia, when farming first appeared over much of
the Mediterranean. Current archaeological and genetic evidence favors a substantial
role for small groups of farmers leap-frogging between choice arable niches, though
with some hunter-gatherer admixture and a considerable endurance of the latter in
locales particularly favorable to their lifestyles, such as big estuarine wetlands. Moreover,
once under way the expansion of farming was relatively swift, and especially so from
Italy to Iberia between roughly 6000 and 5500. Even more strikingly, for the first time
the primary axis of expansion was maritime, with the great southern peninsulas, five
major islands and coastal longshores of the west acting as bridgehead zones; the old
terrestrial Mediterranean of the Paleolithic was starting to be turned inside out.
The major exception to all this is Mediterranean Africa, where the start of the
Holocene witnessed groups of hunter-gatherers expanding out of their refuges in the
habitat islands of the Maghreb and Cyrenaica. Here early farming remains unattested,
save for a small enclave in the western Maghreb by the mid-sixth millennium that was
assuredly an offshoot from Iberia, and a poorly dated, but seemingly comparably late
uptake as an adjunct to aquatic hunting and gathering in the Nile delta. There are
several good reasons why such a different pathway should have been trodden. For one
thing, like much of the European side too, Mediterranean Africa was poorer in poten-
tial candidates for local domestication. But unlike the convoluted northern flank of
the basin, geography offered only few narrow points of entry for an exogenous
Neolithic; that closest to the Levant was long delayed by the success of aquatic alter-
natives on the Nile, while that in the western Maghreb was dependent on the arrival
date for farming on the opposite side of the strait of Gibraltar. The Sicilian strait
appears to have come alive only slightly later, and in general a further negative point
may be the lack of evidence for the growth of a north-African seafaring tradition com-
parable to that seen elsewhere, which itself tends to reflect a less conducive, island-
poor coastal configuration. All of these factors help to explain, more positively, the
attraction of a quite different phenomenon to the south, as the lush early Holocene