Advantages of the Fertile Crescent http://www. israel-a-history-of lies within the world’s largest Mediterranean climate zone: mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers. This selects for plants able to survive drought and then resume growth rapidly (annuals – seeds being the survival mechanism, the plant itself dries up and dies in the dry season) the wild ancestors of many Fertile Crescent crops were already abundant and highly productive in large stands, yielding up to 50:1 energy return (wheat, barley) Some other advantages of the Fertile Crescent’s Mediterranean zone is great internal diversity of climate (producing a greater floristic diversity), greater year-to-year variability in weather (favoring annuals), great range of altitudes favors staggered harvest zones, and wealth of suitable large mammals for domestication