Recent work at Hallan Çemi and other round house horizon sites in eastern Anatolia indicates that the Taurus-Zagros flanks were a second autochthonous center of neolithization in southwestern Asia. Fully settled complex hunter-gatherer societies are in existence in this area by the late Younger Dryas. These settled village societies were based on adaptations that did not involve cereal exploitation, presumably because cereals were absent in this area during the late Younger Dryas. Instead, these adaptations revolved around the exploitation of nuts and pulses, plus the hunting of ovicaprids and deer supplemented by early experiments with animal husbandry involving pigs. They are thus distinct from those that served as the foundation for the earliest sedentary societies in the Levant. Most current attempts to explain the beginnings of settled village life in southwestern Asia are based solely on Levantine data, which until recently were virtually all that were available. The Anatolian data do not conform to the Levantine pattern and thus raise serious questions about the general validity of these models.

The archaeobotanical assemblage of the Aceramic Neolithic site of M'lefaat, dated to the beginning of the 10th millennium uncal. BP, is dominated by legumes, especially Vicieae, Lathyrus/Vicia, Vicia ervilia and Lens, and by grasses, such as Hordeum spon- taneum/distichon, Aegilops cylindrica/tauschii/spehoides ssp. speltoides and Triticura boeoticum/Secale. Other taxa such as Gypsophila pilosa type and Bellevalia type, also count for a significant part of the assemblage. Taxa associated with a riverine environment dominate the charcoal assemblage. The archaeobotanical results of other contemporary steppic sites of the northern Fertile Crescent. (Qermez Dere, Abu Hureyra, Mureybet and Jerfel Ahmar), were compared to those of M'lefaat. The results are quite similar : legumes, especially Vicia and Lens, and grasses, especially Hordeum spontaneum/distichon and Triticum boeoticum/Secale, dominate. A distinctive trait of the M'lefaat assemblage is the abundance of Aegilops. Although it is impossible to rule out domestication or cultivation, there is no positive evidence for this at the site. Archaeobotanical results from M'lefaat and other steppic sites suggest that wetter conditions and a moist-steppe vegetation and/or forest-steppe, with good grasses, were in place 10,000 BP.

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