  We address the question of whether or not assembly bias arises in the absence
of highly non-linear effects such as tidal stripping of halos near larger mass
concentrations. Therefore, we use a simplified dynamical scheme where these
effects are not modeled. We choose the punctuated Zel'dovich (PZ)
approximation, which prevents orbit mixing by coalescing particles coming
within a critical distance of each other. A numerical implementation of this
approximation is fast, allowing us to run a large number of simulations to
study assembly bias. We measure an assembly bias from 60 PZ simulations, each
with 512^3 cold particles in a 128h^-1 Mpc cubic box. The assembly bias
estimated from the correlation functions at separations < 5h^-1 Mpc for objects
(halos) at z=0 is comparable to that obtained in full N-body simulations. For
masses 4x10^11 h^-1 Mo the "oldest" 10% haloes are 3-5 times more correlated
than the "youngest" 10%. The bias weakens with increasing mass, also in
agreement with full N-body simulations. We find that that halo ages are
correlated with the dimensionality of the surrounding linear structures as
measured by the parameter (\lambda_1+\lambda_2+\lambda_3)/
(\lambda_1^2+\lambda_2^2+\lambda_3^2)^{1/2} where \lambda_i are proportional to
the eigenvalues of the velocity deformation tensor. Our results suggest that
assembly bias may already be encoded in the early stages of the evolution.
