Agriculture did not begin in the luxuriant valleys of Egypt and Mesopotamia, where there would have been "too much competition from the natural vegetation. It originated in the wooded rocky hills where competition was less intense and where the ancestors of modern crops were already growing in the open spaces between the trees. (Hepper, p. 76.) The first evidence of farming appears, as far as we know, ca. 8000 BC at a place called Catal Hüyük, high up on what is today the Turkish plateau.