From around 9500 BCE, communities in the Fertile Crescent of South-West Asia gradually shifted from hunting and gathering to settled farming, domesticating cereals such as wheat and barley and animals such as sheep, goats and cattle. Comparable transitions occurred independently in several other world regions over the following millennia. Farming produced storable food surpluses and tied people to fixed fields and granaries.
Surplus and sedentary life made permanent villages possible and, over time, the first sizeable walled settlements such as Catalhoyuk and Jericho — the essential precondition for all later urbanism.