This was the Younger Dryas Period, which was a short return to an Ice Age. The climate was cold and dry. Water sources were drying up and people retreated to higher altitudes to find it. Also retreating were the edible plant and animal species, since they also needed water. It has been hypothesized that the invention of agriculture was an attempt to gather and replant dwindling edible species in the areas the people had moved to and where they could be provided with water.

In Noah's Flood, Ryan and Pitman hold to a new theory put forward by David Harris in Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia. It maintains that, rather than agriculture originating in several places independently, there were actually only one or two places of origin. The first one was near the Dead Sea at some site like Jericho in the late 10th Millennium BC. The ‘founder crops' and the practice of agriculture then spread north into Anatolia and east to Iraq and Iran. Farming in the Levant and Fertile Crescent in the late 10th Millennium predated that of Europe by at least 2,000 years. In November of "97, paleogeneticists found DNA evidence of the oldest yet-discovered domesticated grain (einkorn) in Anatolia. At this time, the only thing domesticated by the Mesolithic hunter/gatherers from the Bosporus clear around north of the lake to the Caucasus Mtns was the dog.

The domestication of sheep and goats followed agriculture by a few hundred years out of Anatolia and Persia. According to Vere Gordon Childe and Pumpelly, the oldest domesticated sheep in Europe is descended from a species (Ovis vignei) native to Turkestan and Afghanistan.

Village-life was almost as old as agriculture. People lived seasonally in large villages for several months each year long before the domestication of cereals or pulses. Hunter/gatherers at this time were more advanced than they are given credit for. At Tabqua Reservoir on the Euphrates River, a hunter/gatherer village was found at Abu Hureyra (settled from 11,000 till 9500 BC) at which circular and oval reed huts were found. At first, there were just a few outdoor fireplaces. Then the reed huts started appearing with their own indoor fire-pits. The hunter/gatherers lived here a good part of the year, except when they moved to the open prairie to hunt gazelle. They used netting, brush fences, and the walls of dry stream beds to channel the gazelle they were driving into narrow enclosures called desert kites. Once captured, they selectively killed only the young males (based on the teeth and bones carried back to the village).

These people, called Natufians by archeologists, used both sun-drying and salt to preserve their meat. They also collected fish and molluscs from the river.

There were over a hundred species of edible plants gathered by these people. They used sickles made of deer antler, carved to shape, then studded with flakes of flint to harvest natural growths of native rye, wheat, lentil, barley, and vetch. They also ate the fruit of the caper bush, as well as hackberries, plums, figs and pears.

Several other Natufian villages have been found in the fertile crescent, including Jericho, Tell Aswad, Ain Mallah, Beidha, and Mureybet. As the climate became more arid, most of these villages were abandoned. The next people who settled in Abu Hureyra after the dry mini-Ice-Age, already knew how to farm.

It was during this drying out period that a hunting tool, new to the Near/Middle/Far East, was developed to help hunt desert foods such as gazelle, ibex, and hare. It was in the Negev Highlands that the "Harif point" arrows were developed.

Kay Kenyon discovered the site of Jericho in 1950 (10 acres). She found evidence of Natufians separated from the later residents by a dry layer of sand, representing the abandoned stage during the Younger Dryas.

During these Younger Dryas years, the Black Sea lake was an oasis which drew people like a magnet. Villages throughout western Asia were abandoned (even Catal Huyuk), while the population around the Black Sea lake grew. Here, they learned how to plant a crop with seeds, and they traded food, goods, and ideas with other people around the lake.