Advantages of the Fertile Crescent (map, p. 135)
•	lies within the world’s largest Mediterranean climate zone: mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers.  This selects for plants able to survive drought and then resume growth rapidly (annuals – seeds being the survival mechanism, the plant itself dries up and dies in the dry season)
•	the wild ancestors of many Fertile Crescent crops were already abundant and highly productive in large stands, yielding up to 50:1 energy return (wheat, barley)
•	Some other advantages of the Fertile Crescent’s Mediterranean zone is great internal diversity of climate (producing a greater floristic diversity), greater year-to-year variability in weather (favoring annuals), great range of altitudes favors staggered harvest zones, and wealth of suitable large mammals for domestication