Pre-domestic cultivation, or sowing and harvesting, of morphologically wild plants was an inevitable step in the adoption of cultivation which led to the development of agriculture in the ancient Near East. The overall transition from gatherers to established farmers with domestic crops probably spanned three millennia (Tanno and Willcox 2006, Fuller 2007). At a number of archaeological sites which date from 13,000 to 10,000 BP, remains of wild progenitors have been interpreted to be the result of cultivation rather than of gathering. Van Zeist and Bakker-Heeres (1986) and later Colledge (1998, 2001) suggested the possibility of pre-domestic cultivation for twelfth millennium levels at Mureybet. Van Zeist also used similar arguments for later levels at Cayönü (van Zeist and de Roller 1994). Hillman et al. (2001) argued for cultivation at the Epipalaeolithic site of Abu Hureyra, dated to about 13,000 years ago. In the southern Levant, Kislev (1997) argued for pre-domestic cultivation at Netiv Hagdud, dated to about 11,300 years ago, and Edwards et al. (2004) argued the same for Zahrat adh-Dhra. While it is fair to say that there is a consensus of opinion that pre-domestic cultivation predates morphological domestication by a millennium or more (Tanno and Willcox 2006, Fuller 2007, Brown et al. 2009), reliable data to confirm this hypothesis are hard to come by.

Archaeobotanical analyses of charred remains from recent excavations at Jerf el Ahmar in northern Syria have allowed us to identify pre-domestic cultivation with more certainty than before.