The uncertainty attached to the earliest phases of agriculture makes it impossible to speculate on the immediate social consequences of the invention of food production. One would expect these to consist in a greater emphasis on local rather than tribal groupings, a limitation of outlook and horizon, a progressive differentiation of separate settlements as a result of their attachment to the soil. But the introduction of agriculture probably did not mean the more or less speedy transition to a fully settled life or to a socio-political organization on a large scale.[58] Nor did it mean that all the other ways of finding sustenance were neglected. A “partial exploitation of the environment”[59] is characteristic of modern savages who have become stuck in a backwater, but not of the true primitives of antiquity. The Natufians may have sown a catch crop or gathered wild grasses, but they also hunted deer and speared fish. All the early settlements of the Near East show signs of a many-sided economy, although in all of them agriculture played an important part. In all of them, too, we find stock-breeding; and this is an innovation which we must simply take for granted since its origin and motivation is at present quite obscure.[60] The Natufians did not possess domestic animals. Other inventions, too, were known throughout the Near East in the earliest settlements of the New Stone Age. Pottery-making is one of them, weaving another. It is hardly to be wondered that we cannot follow the first phases of their existence. If the earliest pots, for instance, were only dried in the sun or lightly baked or were merely clay-lined baskets, they cannot be expected to have survived. And it may be considered exceptionally fortunate that of early textiles a few scraps have survived for six or seven thousand years.[61] It is likewise only due to the refinements of modern excavation technique that the oldest of the successive settlements of Hassuna, near Mosul (Fig. 2), was recognized as a camp site, consisting of no more than a number of hearths, still containing wood ashes. They were made of “potsherds and pebbles set in a kind of primitive cement” with pottery lying around them.[62] Only in higher levels did adobe walls appear. This single instance in which a very early settlement was recognized explains why others remain unknown.[63] But we know that after (or during) the time of the Natufians these important discoveries were made and diffused among villages stretching from the Nile valley through the Delta and thence in a great arch (Fig. 51) from Jericho in the south, via Byblos and Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast to Mersin in Cilicia; then, through the Amuq plain, east of Antioch, via Carchemish on the Euphrates to Tell Halaf and Chagar Bazar in North Syria to Nineveh and Hassuna near Mosul, and on eastwards, to Sialk near Kashan in central Persia.