“The transition from hunter-gatherer to farming lifestyles involved changes in all aspects of human lifeways: how food was acquired; technology, mobility, settlement and architecture; demography and social relations; ideas of ownership, property and ideology. With such all-encompassing change, farming probably emerged gradually rather than as a Neolithic revolution within each centre of origin. Similarly, the transition is likely to have been a spatially diffuse process, with plant cultivation, animal herding and sedentism developing independently in different localities. New ideas, tools, crops and other items would have flowed through spatially extensive social networks, coalescing in favourable environmental and cultural circumstances to create a diversity of farming lifestyles. Here, we provide further evidence for the social networks that underpinned the emergence of farming in Southwest Asia by outlining a series of previously unrecognised material and symbolic connections between sites in the Northern and Southern Levant.” “Ethnographic accounts for the spatial scale of such social networks (e.g. Bird et al. 2019) suggest that those of the Late Epipalaeolithic (c. 13 000–10 000 BC) and PPNA (c. 10 000–8200 BC) would have connected people throughout Southwest Asia, approximately 1200km from north to south and 800km east to west. In addition to Göbekli Tepe, gathering places— nodes within the social networks—are likely to be represented by sites with particularly large structures, such as Karahan Tepe, Hallan Çemi and Jerf el Ahmar in the north, and Wadi Hammeh 27, Mallaha and Jericho in the south” “Wherever and whenever the ideas originated, the finds from WF16 indicate that symbols and ideology were flowing along social networks that extended between the far south and the far north of Southwest Asia during the formative millennia, prior to the emergence of farming.”—”The flow of ideas: shared symbolism during the Neolithic emergence in Southwest Asia: WF16 and Göbekli Tepe”