Environmental conditions and cultivation practices when agriculture first emerged in Western Europe

About 7,000 years ago, the first farmers in the western Mediterranean selected the most fertile land available, cultivated cereal varieties very similar to today's, and made sparing use of domestic animal feces, as they do today. These are some of the elements that characterize the expansion of agriculture during the Neolithic period in Western Europe, according to an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.