If the movement was up the Nile (southward), as these dates suggest, then I suspect that the earliest available village material of middle Egypt, the so-called Tasian, is also later than that of the Fayum. The Tasian materials come from a few graves near a village called Deir Tasa, and I have an uncomfortable feeling that the Tasian “assemblage” may be mainly an artificial selection of poor examples of objects which belong in the following range of time. SPREAD IN TIME AND SPACE There are now two things we can do; in fact, we have already begun to do them. We can watch the spread of the new way of life upward through time in the nuclear area. We can also see how the new way of life spread outward in space from the nuclear area, as time went on. There is good archeological evidence that both these processes took place. For the hill country of northeastern Iraq, in the nuclear area, we have already noticed how the succession (still with gaps) from Karim Shahir, through M’lefaat and Jarmo, to Hassuna can be charted (see chart, p. 111). In the next chapter, we shall continue this charting and description of what happened in Iraq upward through time. We also watched traces of the new way of life move through space up the Nile into Africa, to reach Khartoum in the Sudan some thirty-five hundred years later than we had seen it at Jarmo or Jericho. We caught glimpses of it in the Fayum and perhaps at Tasa along the way. For the remainder of this chapter, I shall try to suggest briefly for you the directions taken by the spread of the new way of life from the nuclear area in the Near East. First, let me make clear again that I _do not_ believe that the village-farming community way of life was invented only once and in the Near East. It seems to me that the evidence is very clear that a separate experiment arose in the New World. For China, the question of independence or borrowing--in the appearance of the village-farming community there--is still an open one. In the last chapter, we noted the probability of an independent nuclear area in southeastern Asia. Professor Carl Sauer strongly champions the great importance of this area as _the_ original center of agricultural pursuits, as a kind of “cradle” of all incipient eras of the Old World at least. While there is certainly not the slightest archeological evidence to allow us to go that far, we may easily expect that an early southeast Asian development would have been felt in China. However, the appearance of the village-farming community in the northwest of India, at least, seems to have depended on the earlier development in the Near East. It is also probable that ideas of the new way of life moved well beyond Khartoum in Africa. THE SPREAD OF THE VILLAGE-FARMING COMMUNITY WAY OF LIFE INTO EUROPE