The Venus of Willendorf, also known as the Woman of Willendorf, is an eleven centimeter (4.3 inches) high statuette of a female figure; the estimated date of manufacture is between 24,000 and 22,000 BCE.

Discovered, still bearing traces of red pigment, in 1908 by archaeologist Josef Szombathy at a Paleolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria near the city of Krems, it is carved from an oolitic limestone that is not local to the area, and tinted with red ochre.

The apparent large size of the breasts and abdomen, and the detail put into the vulva, have led scholars to interpret the figure as a fertility symbol.

The figure has no visible face, her head being covered with circular horizontal bands of what might be rows of plaited hair, or a type of headdress.

The purpose of the carving is subject to much speculation.

The statue was not created with feet and does not stand on its own.

The heavy stress on the female anatomical features and the absence of facial expression emphasize the figure’s sexuality.

Since this figure's discovery and naming, several similar statuettes and other forms of art have been discovered.

They are collectively referred to as Venus figurines, although they predate the mythological figure of Venus by millennia.

The Neolithic way of life is first achieved in Mesopotamia (the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present Iraq) and in what are today Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel.

The sheep, derived mainly from the Asian Mouflon, is domesticated in the Middle East.

Farming settlements appear in southern Mesopotamia.

Cultivation of wheat, barley, peas, and olives had begun in the ninth millennium BCE, along with domestication of sheep, goats, and pigs.

By this time, most animals that are amenable to domestication, such as cattle and poultry, have already been tamed.

Obsidian, like all glass and some other types of naturally occurring rocks, breaks with a characteristic conchoidal fracture.

A naturally occurring volcanic glass formed as an extrusive igneous rock, Stone Age cultures value it because, like flint, it can be fractured to produce sharp blades or arrowheads, or polished to create early mirrors.

Obsidian is widely traded in the Mediterranean and Near East in the eighth millennium BCE.

Bladed tools found in southwest Iran, dating from around 8000 BCE, are made from obsidian that had been transported from Anatolia.

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN, around 9000 to 6000 BCE) represents the early Neolithic in the Levantine and upper Mesopotamian region of the Fertile Crescent.

It succeeds the Natufian culture of the Epipaleolithic (Mesolithic) as the domestication of plants and animals is in its beginnings and triggered by the Younger Dryas.

The Neolithic period is traditionally divided to the Pre-Pottery (A and B) and Pottery phases.

Kathleen Kenyon originally defined these in the type-site of Jericho (Palestine), established by around 8000 BCE during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA).

Jericho is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with evidence of settlement dating back to 9000 BCE, providing important information about early human habitation in the Near East.

The first permanent settlement was built near the Ein as-Sultan spring, between 10,000 and 9000 BCE and consisted of a number of walls, a religious shrine, and a twenty-three foot (seventeen meter) stone tower with an internal staircase.

Bricks of baked mud are used for the first time around 8000 BCE at Jericho to build houses.

The permanent dwellings of Jericho feature domed roofs of wattle and daub, stone foundations, and door openings.

Some two thousand to three thousand people live within the settlement's walls, outside of which lie fields of cultivated barley and einkorn, a single-grained wheat.

A simple wooden corral would suffice to pen the community's sheep and goats, races recently domesticated, along with pigs and cats.

Small rural farming communities in the ancient Near East practce imple metallurgy sby at least 7000 BCE.

Crude examples of cold hammered copper from Çayönü, a Neolithic ceremonial settlement in southern Turkey inhabited around 7200 to 6600 BCE, date from as early as 7000.

Çayönü is possibly the place where the pig (Sus scrofa) was first domesticated.

The wild fauna include wild boar, wild sheep, wild goat, and cervids.

The Neolithic environment includes marshes and swamps near the Bogazcay, open wood, patches of steppe and almond-pistachio forest-steppe to the south.

The genetically common ancestor of sixty eight contemporary types of cereal still grows as a wild plant on the slopes of Mount Karaca (Karaca Dag), which is located in close vicinity to Çayönü, according to the Max Planck Institute for Breeding Research in Cologne (reported in Der Spiegel of either March 6 or June 3, 2006.)

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.

Brick building is taking place at Çatalhöyük around 6000 BCE.

Its people appear to have lived relatively egalitarian lives with no apparent social classes, as no houses with distinctive features (belonging to royalty or religious hierarchy, for example) have been found so far.

The most recent investigations also reveal little social distinction based on gender, with both men and women receiving equivalent nutrition and apparently, having relatively equal social status as typically found in Paleolithic cultures.

In upper levels of the site, it becomes apparent that the people of Çatalhöyük were gaining skills in agriculture and the domestication of animals.

Female figurines have been found within bins used for storage of cereals such as wheat and barley that are presumed to be a deity protecting the grain.

Peas were also grown, and almonds, pistachios, and fruit were harvested from trees in the surrounding hills.

Sheep were domesticated and evidence suggests the beginning of cattle domestication as well.

However, hunting continued to be a major source of meat for the community.

The making of pottery and the construction of obsidian tools were major industries.

Obsidian tools were probably both used and traded for items such as Mediterranean sea shells and flint from Syria.

Among archaeological sites in Anatolia, Çatalhöyük features native copper artifacts and smelted lead beads, but no smelted copper.

Groups of people still using stone tools but with knowledge of agriculture reach the Aegean from Anatolia or farther east and settle in parts of the mainland and in Crete.

Because of a lack of written records, estimates of Cretan chronology are based on well-established Aegean and Ancient Near Eastern pottery styles, so that Cretan timelines have been made by seeking Cretan artifacts traded with other civilizations (such as the Egyptians)—a well established occurrence.

For the earlier times, radiocarbon dating of organic remains and charcoal offers independent dates.

Based on this, it is thought that Crete was inhabited from the seventh millennium BCE onward.

The first human settlement in Crete dates to the aceramic Neolithic.

There have been some claims for Paleolithic remains, none of them very convincing.

The native fauna of Crete included pygmy hippo, pygmy elephant, dwarf deer (Praemegaceros cretensis), giant rodents and insectivores as well as badger, beech marten and a kind of terrestrial otter.

Large carnivores were lacking.

Most of these animals died out at the end of the last ice age.

Humans played a part in this extinction, which occurred on other medium to large Mediterranean islands as well, for example on Cyprus, Sicily and Majorca.

A group of the first people to land in Crete at the end of the seventh millennium BCE settles a hill west of the Kairatos stream; the settlement’s remains will be found under the Bronze Age palace at Knossos (layer X).

The first settlers introduce cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and dogs, as well as domesticated cereals and legumes.

Up to now, Knossos remains the only aceramic site.

The settlement covers approximately three hundred and fifty thousand square meters.

The sparse animal bones contain the above-mentioned domestic species as well as deer, badger, marten and mouse: the extinction of the local megafauna had not left much game behind.

The Dadiwan culture, a Neolithic culture found primarily in Gansu and western Shaanxi, China, takes its name from the earliest layer, around 5800, found at the type-site at Dadiwan.

The remains of millet and pigs were found in sites associated with the culture.

The culture shares several similarities with the Cishan and Peiligang cultures.

The population of the Halaf culture in southern Mesopotamia practices dryland farming, based on exploiting natural rainfall without the help of irrigation, in a similar practice to that still practiced today by the Hopi people of Arizona.

Emmer wheat, two-rowed barley, and flax are grown.

They keep cattle, sheep, and goats.

Although no Halaf settlement has been extensively excavated, some buildings have been excavated: the tholoi of Tell Arpachiyah, circular domed structures approached through long rectangular anterooms.

Only a few of these structures have ever been excavated.

They were constructed of mud-brick sometimes on stone foundations and may have been for ritual use (one contained a large number of female figurines).

Other circular buildings were probably just houses.

The best-known, most characteristic pottery of Tell Halaf, called Halaf ware, produced by specialist potters, can be painted, sometimes using more than two colors (called polychrome) with geometric and animal motifs.

Other types of Halaf pottery are known, including unpainted, cooking ware and ware with burnished surfaces.

There are many theories about why the distinctive pottery style developed.

The theory is that the pottery came about due to regional copying and that it was exchanged as a prestige item between local elites is now disputed.

The polychrome painted Halaf pottery has been proposed to be a "trade pottery"—pottery produced for export—however, the predominance of locally produced painted pottery in all areas of Halaf sites including potters settlement questions that theory.

The finding of Halaf pottery in other parts of northern Mesopotamia, such as at Nineveh and Tepe Gawra, Chagar Bazar and at many sites in Anatolia (Turkey), suggests that it was widely used in the region.

In addition, the Halaf communities made female figurines of partially baked clay and stone and stamp seals of stone.

The seals are thought to mark the development of concepts of personal property, as similar seals were used for this purpose in later times.

The Halaf people used tools made of stone and clay.

Copper was also known, but was not used for tools.

China’s Beixin culture begins around 5300 BCE.

Archaeologists have discovered fifty sites from the culture, which show evidence of millet cultivation and water buffalo domestication.

The type-site at Beixin was discovered in Tengzhou, Shandong.