The one hundred and fifty or so people who live in the settlement at Jarmo (an archaeological site named after the Kurdish village of Qallat Jarmo in the foothills of northern Iraq, about thirty-five miles—fifty-five kilometers—east of Kirkuk) cultivate two kinds of domesticated wheat and tend sheep and goats around 6750 BCE.

Known as the oldest agricultural community in the world, Jarmo is broadly contemporary with such other important Neolithic sites such as Jericho in the southern Levant and Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia.

The site is approximately three to four acres (twelve thousand to sixteen thousand meters.)

in size and lies at an altitude of eight hundred meters above sea level in a belt of oak and pistachio woodlands.

Excavated by the American archaeologist Robert Braidwood in 1948-55, the site fueled Braidwood’s hypothesis that plant domestication and early farming in the Near East originated in the hilly flanks of northern Iraq's Zagros Mountains.