ARTICLES
The Natufian Culture in the Levant,
Threshold to the Origins of Agriculture
OFER BAR-YOSEF
As with other crucial thresholds in
cultural evolution, the impact of the
‘‘Neolithic Revolution,’’ as it was labeled
by V. G. Childe,5 or the ‘‘incipient
cultivation and domestication’’ as it
was defined by R. Braidwood,6 can
only be evaluated on the basis of its
outcome. I begin with a brief description
of the cultural sequence of the
late hunter-gatherers who inhabited
the Near East until about 13,000 B.P.7
These foragers, who had a variety of
subsistence strategies and types of annual
schedules, ranged from semisedentary
groups to small mobile
bands. The establishment of sedentary
Natufian hamlets in the Levant (Fig. 1)
marked a major organizational departure
from the old ways of life. This was
followed by a second major socioeconomic
threshold, characterized archeologically
by Early Neolithic cultivators.
This sequence of changes can
only be understood within the context
of the entire region and the shifting
paleobotanical conditions of the Levant
during this period.
I therefore begin with a brief description
of the Levant and its natural
resources during the terminal Pleistocene
and early Holocene (18,000 to
9,000 B.P.: uncalibrated radio carbon
years8). During this period, the landscape
of the Near East was not dry,
barren, and thorny as it appears today.
Using palynological, paleobotanical,
and geomorphological data, we are
able to propose instead a reconstruction
of the spatial distribution of an
oak-dominated parkland and woodland
that provided the highest biomass
of foods exploitable by humans.
This vegetational belt mostly covered
the Mediterranean coastal plains and
hilly ranges, as well as a few oases.
Recently published reports from the
excavated Late Paleolithic (or EpiPaleolithic),
Natufian, and Neolithic
sites, together with this reconstruction
of natural resources, allow us to
answer the questions of when and
where the Neolithic Revolution occurred.
However, we are still far from
providing a definitive answer to the
question of why it occurred.
Within the large region of the Near
East, recent archeological work has
demonstrated the importance of the
area known as the Mediterranean Levant.
Today it is one of the most researched
parts of the Near East.1–4,9–18
It is therefore possible that the picture
I will draw is somewhat biased due to
the limited number of excavations elsewhere,
such as in western Iran, northern
Iraq, or southeast Turkey.19–22 However,
no field project outside of the
Levant has yet exposed any indication
of a prehistoric entity that resembles
the Natufian. As will become clear in
the following pages, such an entity can
be recognized through its combined
archeological attributes, including
dwellings, graves, lithic and bone industries,
ground stone tools, ornamentation,
and art objects, as well as the
early age of its sedentary hamlets
among all foragers societies in the
Near East.
THE REGION: RESOURCES AND
POTENTIAL FORAGING PATTERNS
The Mediterranean Levant, about
1,100 km long and about 250 to 350
km wide, incorporates a variety of
landscapes, from the southern flanks
of the Taurus Mountains in Turkey to
the Sinai peninsula (Fig. 1). The variable
topography comprises a narrow
coastal plain, two parallel continuous
mountain ranges with a rift valley in
between, and an eastward sloping plateau
dissected by many eastward running
wadis. The region is characterThe
aim of this paper is to provide the reader with an updated description of the
archeological evidence for the origins of agriculture in the Near East. Specifically, I
will address the question of why the emergence of farming communities in the Near
East was an inevitable outcome of a series of social and economic circumstances
that caused the Natufian culture to be considered the threshold for this major
evolutionary change.1–4 The importance of such an understanding has global
implications. Currently, updated archeological information points to two other
centers of early cultivation, central Mexico and the middle Yangtze River in China,
that led to the emergence of complex civilizations.4 However, the best-recorded
sequence from foraging to farming is found in the Near East. Its presence warns
against the approach of viewing all three evolutionary sequences as identical in
terms of primary conditions, economic and social motivations and activities, and the
resulting cultural, social, and ideological changes.
Ofer Bar-Yosef studies Middle and Upper
Paleolithic sequences in the Near East, as
well as the origins of agriculture as expressed
in the archaeology of Epi-Paleolithic
Neolithic sites. He has published papers
and co-edited volumes on various
prehistoric sites of Pleistocene and Holocene
ageintheLevant.HeistheMacCurdyProfessor
of Prehistoric Archaeology in the Department
of Anthropology, Harvard University.
E-mail: obaryos@fas.harvard.edu
Key words: origins of agriculture; Levant; Natufian;
Early Neolithic
Evolutionary Anthropology 159
ized by marked seasonality: winters
are cold and rainy, summers are hot
and dry. Mediterranean woodland and
open parkland vegetation develop
where annual precipitation reaches
400 to 1,200 mm a year. Shrub land,
steppic vegetation (Irano-Turanian),
and arid plant associations (SaharoArabian)
cover the areas where annual
precipitation is less than 400 mm (for
the current situation see Zohary23).
Today, two annual patterns of winter
storm tracks prevail. One carries
humidity from the Mediterranean Sea
to the southern Levant; the second
arrives from northern Europe and
turns to the northern Levant, leaving
the southern portion dry. Chemical
studies of the beds of Lake Lisan, an
Upper Pleistocene lake in the Jordan
Valley, and the early Holocene distribution
of C3 and C4 plants in the Negev
demonstrate that the geographic pattern
of annual rainfall during the late
Pleistocene and the early Holocene
was similar to today’s.24 Decadal and
centennial fluctuations of precipitation,
more than temperature changes,
were responsible for the expansion
and contraction of the vegetational
belts as reflected in the palynological
sequences.16,25
Floral resources in the Levant are
seasonal, with seeds most abundant
from April to June and fruits from
September to November. Tubers are
rare. Among the three vegetational
zones, the Mediterranean is the richest,
with more than one hundred edible
fruits, seeds, leaves, and tubers.23
The faunal biomass gradually
dwindles away from the Mediterranean
core area. Dense oak forests,
where precipitation surpasses 800 mm,
maintain a lower biomass than do
open parklands. Thus the mosaic associations
of Mediterranean vegetation,
bordering the Irano-Turanian shrub
land, are the most optimal in terms of
carrying capacity.26,27 It is along the
prehistoric position of this belt that
. . . no field project
outside of the Levant has
yet exposed any
indication of a
prehistoric entity that
resembles the Natufian.
Figure 1. A map of the Near East indicating the territories of the Early Natufian homeland, the expansion of the Late Natufian culture, and the
area of the Harifian culture, a desertic adaptation of the Late Natufian to the cold, dry conditions of the Younger Dryas.
160 Evolutionary Anthropology ARTICLES
the major cultivating communities
emerged.28
Game animals included the mountain
gazelle (Gazella gazella), a stationary
antelope with a small home range
that varies from a few to as many as 25
square kilometers.29 A larger home
range can be inferred for Gazella subgutturosa,
the dominant species in the
Syro-Arabian desert. Other mammals
included wild cattle (Bos primigenius),
fallow deer (Dama mesopotmaica), roe
deer (Capreolus capreolus), and wild
boar (Sus scrofa). The rare wild goat
(Capra aegagrus) occupied parkland
areas while the ibex (Cabra ibex) inhabited
the cliffy, drier landscapes.27,30
The optimal foraging pattern of late
Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, one that
combined both residential and logistical
movements, was probably the most
efficient. Topography made anticipated
moves of social units or task
forces along east-west transects easier,
for this route took advantage of the
north-south layout of mountain ranges
and vegetational belts. The optimum
territory for a band of hunter-gatherers
within the Mediterranean vegetational
belt is estimated to be about 300
to 500 square kilometers.2 In contrast,
foragers in steppe or desert regions
were required to monitor an area of
500 to 2,000 square kilometers as a
buffer against annual fluctuations.
In this system, decreasing annual
precipitation and shifts in the distribution
of rains that diminished yields of
wild fruits, seeds, and game animals
would place stress mainly on the steppe
and desert belts.31 In contrast, resources
in the Mediterranean belt
would have been more stable. Levantine
foragers would have had many
ways to alleviate short- and longterm
stresses: population aggregation
in the Mediterranean core areas; social
and techno-economic reorganization
within the same territories that
would affect the core area; immigration
to adjacent regions northward or
southward along the coastal ranges; or
the use of warfare to take over territories,
especially where bands did not
belong to the same alliance.28 Each of
these strategies or a combination of
several would have resulted in the
emergence of new spatial alignment of
the population, which would have been
expressed in adjusted ideologies.
THE PALEOCLIMATIC RECORD
Paleoclimatic information is often
derived from the records of oxygen
isotope fluctuations registered in ice
cores, deep sea cores, and terrestrial
vegetational reconstructions based on
pollen cores from lakes. The following
sequence emerges when such data sets
are supplemented with information
from geomorphological sequences,
bio-geographic interpretations of fluctuating
faunal spectra, incomplete archeo-botanical
records, and pollen
from archeological sites:2–4,16,17,32,33
1. During the Late Glacial Maximum,
dated to ca. 20,000 to 14,500
B.P. the entire region was cold and dry,
but the hilly coastal areas enjoyed
winter precipitation and were covered
by forests.
2. Precipitation over the entire region
slowly increased beginning about
14,500 B.P. and more rapidly from
13,500 to 13,000 B.P. The rate of precipitation
peaked around 11,500 B.P.
in the southern Levant.
3. Rainfall decreased during the
Younger Dryas period (ca. 11,000 to
10,000 B.P.).
4. Pluvial conditions returned
around 10,300 B.P., indicating a very
wet early Holocene in the northern
Levant and Anatolia, but did not reach
the previous peak in the central and
southern Levant.16,25
5. A gradual rise in sea level after the
Late Glacial Maximum until the midHolocene
reduced the flat, sandy
coastal plain of the Levant by a stretch
5 to 20 km wide and 500 km long.
Given the poor aquatic resources in
this section of the Mediterranean sea,
the rise in sea level mainly affected the
size of foraging territories and the
collection of marine shells often used
for decoration.
FROM MOBILE
HUNTER-GATHERERS TO
SEDENTARY FORAGERS
The archeology of the late Paleolithic
foragers is relatively wellknown.1,34,35
Social units have been
identified based on selective analysis
of stone artifacts combined with other
attributes such as site size and structure,
the distribution of settlements,
and the reconstructed pattern of seasonal
mobility.1–4,11,28,34,36–41 For instance,
the Kebaran (ca. 18,000 to
14,500 B.P.) sites were limited geographically
to the coastal Levant and
isolated oases due the prevailing cold,
dry climate. Geometric Kebaran foragers
took advantage of the climatic
amelioration around 14,500 to 13,000
B.P., expanding into the formerly desertic
belt, which had became a lusher
steppe.39–41 Ground stone mortars,
bowls, and cupholes, which first appeared
in the Upper Paleolithic, are
considered to indicate vegetal food
processing.42 The invention of these
tools marks a revolutionary departure
from Middle Paleolithic methods of
plant food preparation. It not only
heralds the ‘‘broad-spectrum exploitation’’
that was conceived as a prerequisite
for the agricultural revolution, but
also is supported by the recent discovery
of carbonized plant remains in a
water-logged site, Ohallo II, dated to
19,000 B.P.43 The assemblage contains
a rich suite of seeds and fruits, already
known to scientists from the basal
layers of Abu Hureira.44 Both collections
reflect intensified gathering of
r-resources from a variety of habitats
and plant associations. Fallow deer,
gazelle, and wild boar were hunted in
the central Levant, whereas gazelle,
ibex, and hare were the common game
in the steppic belt. Wild goat and
sheep were common in the Taurus and
Zagros mountains.
The climatic improvement after
14,500 B.P. seems to have been responsible
for the presence of more stable
. . . the mosaic
associations of
Mediterranean
vegetation, bordering
the Irano-Turanian shrub
land, are the most
optimal in terms of
carrying capacity. It is
along the prehistoric
position of this belt that
the major cultivating
communities emerged.
ARTICLES Evolutionary Anthropology 161
human occupations in the steppic and
desertic belts. Groups moved into areas
that were previously uninhabited,
from the Mediterranean steppe into
the margins of the Syro-Arabian desert.
Others came from the Nile valley,
creating an interesting social mo-
saic.1,11,35,40,45
THE EMERGENCE OF THE
NATUFIAN CULTURE
The emergence of the Natufian culture
around 13,000 or 12,800 B.P. was
a major turning point in the history of
the Near East.1,28 Originally defined by
Garrod and Neuville on the basis of
the lithic, bone, and ground stone
industries, as well as burials uncovered
in their excavations in caves in
Mount Carmel and the Judean hills,
the Natufian culture has continued to
attract the attention of archeologists.5,46–48
Excavations during the
1950s in Ain Mallaha (Eynan), which
exposed semi-subterranean houses, referred
to as pit-houses in the American
terminology, led J. Perrot to interpret
the site as the remains of a village.
Additional excavations were done at
Nahal Oren,49 Hayonim Cave and Terrace,50–53
Rosh Zin54 and Rosh Horesha,55
Wadi Hammeh 27,56 Wadi Judayid,1
and the lower layers at Beidha,5
providing a wealth of new data. These
data have led to the recognition that a
Natufian ‘‘homeland’’ existed in the
central Levant (Fig. 1) and that the
Natufians were secondary foragers
and, perhaps, the earliest farmers. This
information led to the recognition that
the Natufian culture played a major
role in the emergence of the early
Neolithic farming communities, or
what is known as the Agricultural
Revolution.1–4,12,28,58
The main attraction of the Natufian
cultural remains is the wealth of information
uncovered in every site. Aside
from settlement size, the dwelling
structures, graves, and art objects in
more than one site resemble the remains
of Neolithic villages. In addition,
lithics, elaborate bone industry,
pounding and grinding tools, large
quantities of marine shells, and animal
bones have furnished the required
information for a better reconstruction
of past lifeways. Each of these
aspects provide the basis for the various
interpretations of the socio-economic
system of the Natufian culture.
Site Size and Settlement Pattern
All Natufian base camps in the
‘‘homeland’’ area were located in the
woodland belt, where oak and pistachio
were the dominant species (Fig.
2).1,25 The undergrowth of this open
forest was grass with high frequencies
of cereals. The high mountains of
Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon, the
steppic areas of the Negev and Sinai,
and the Syro-Arabian desert in the
east accommodated only small Natufian
occupations due to both their
lower carrying capacity and the presence
of other groups of foragers who
exploited this vast region. In general,
Natufian sites fall into three size categories:
small (15 to 100 m2), medium
(400 to 500 m2), and large (greater
than 1,000 m2). Only during the Late
Natufian were several larger sites es.
. . the Natufians were
secondary foragers and,
perhaps, the earliest
farmers.
Figure 2. A map of the Levant with the location of most of the sites of the Natufian culture (after
Bar-Yosef and Meadow4).
162 Evolutionary Anthropology ARTICLES
tablished within the steppic belt. Even
so, none of the larger sites ever reached
the size of a large Early Neolithic
village.
Natufian base camps are characterized
by semi-subterranean dwellings
(pit-houses). The foundations were
built of stone and the upper structure
was probably brush and wood. There
is no evidence of the use of mud bricks
or wattle and daub. Fine examples of
Natufian houses were uncovered in
Ain Mallaha (Fig. 3), Wadi Hammeh
27, and Hayonim Cave and Terrace.
Every base camp suggests the rebuilding
of houses, indicating temporary
abandonment of the settlement.
Domestic structures were about 3 to
6 m in diameter, with either rounded
or squarish fireplaces. Although the
fills of the dwellings contained rich
assemblages, identifying specific floors
was not easy. A rare case is the semicircular
house 131 in Ain Mallaha
(Fig. 4), which is 9 m in diameter,
where a series of post holes was preserved.
In certain areas of the floor,
clusters of artifacts were uncovered.
Worth noting is a small building in Ain
Mallaha in which a rounded bench
covered with lime plaster was preserved.
This house is different from
the domestic one and could have been
used for ritual purposes by the leader
or shaman of the group.
In Hayonim Cave, there is a series of
small adjoining oval rooms inside the
cave, each 2.5 to 3.5 m in diameter and
built of undressed stones. There was a
hearth or two in each room except
one. Finds from the lower fill of every
room indicated its domestic use, although
this function seems to have
changed subsequently: one room was
first a kiln for burning limestone and
later was the site of bone tool produc-
tion.
Late Natufian sites have produced
incomplete information. At Nahal
Oren Terrace, elongated enclosure
walls were uncovered. In a lower level
of this site, a series of postholes surrounded
a large fireplace amid a cemetery
area.49 Circular structures were
exposed in Rosh Zin.54 One room had
a slab pavement and a limestone
monolith 1m tall erected at its edge.
This could just have been a domestic
structure, but it is also possible that it
served specific ritual purposes. At Jebel
Saaıˆde´, a Late Natufian site in the
Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, the remains
of collapsed walls were identified, despite
much destruction caused by modern
terracing.60
Despite expectations to the contrary,
storage installations are rare in Natufian
sites. The few examples include a
paved bin in Hayonim Terrace61 and
Figure 3. A: The Early Natufian habitations, primary and secondary burials, of the upper layers at
Ain Mallaha. Note the special pit-house in the left upper corner. B: A cross section along the A-B
line demonstrating the entire stratigraphy of Ain Mallaha. Note the dug-out pits (after Perrot
and Ladiray157).
Figure 4. The large Natufian house in Ain Mallaha
with a proposed reconstruction of its
upper structure. Note the series of postholes
and the number of hearths that seem to have
been used for communal activities (after
Valla59).
ARTICLES Evolutionary Anthropology 163
several plastered pits at Ain Mallaha,
which could have served as underground
storage facilities.62 It is possible
that baskets were used for aboveground
storage. Indirect evidence for
basketry comes from the special bone
tools known from ethnographic studies
to have been used in such activity.63
Graves and Burials
The Natufian population has been
identified as being of Proto-Mediterranean
stock.64 Graves were uncovered
in all base camps in the Natufian heartland
as well as in smaller sites.65,66
Stratigraphic indications from Hayonim
Cave and Ain Mallaha demonstrate
that graves were dug in deserted
dwellings and outside of houses, but
not under the floors of active households.
Graves were in pits, either shallow
or deep, and were rarely paved
with stones or plaster. In several instances
limestone slabs covered the
graves, but graves generally were filled
in with sediment from the site itself.
That sediment contained cobbles, lithics,
broken mortars, and animal bones.
Sealed graves were marked at Nahal
Oren by deep mortars called stone
pipes. In Nahal Oren and Hayonim
Cave, small cupholes pecked in rocks
marked the location of graves.67 In
Nahal Oren, an exceptionally large
fireplace, 1.2m in diameter and surrounded
by limestone slabs, was placed
in the center of a cluster of inhuma-
tions.49
The burials demonstrate variability
in mortuary practices. The pattern of
body disposition in primary burials is
supine, semiflexed, or flexed, with various
orientations of the head. The number
of inhumations per grave varies
from single to multiple. Collective burials
are more common in the Early
Natufian. Several cases of skull removals
were observed in the Late Natufian
context at Hayonim Cave, Nahal Oren,
and Ain Mallaha,12,67 heralding a Neolithic
practice. Secondary burials were
either isolated or mixed with primary
burials. Secondary burials, which occur
more often in the Late than Early
Natufian, are interpreted as evidence
of increased group mobility. Scattered
human bones occur within the occupational
deposits, indicating that the
Natufians disturbed burials of their
own people. Children comprise about
one-third of the dead, indicating a
relatively high mortality among those
aged 5 to 7 years.68 This is interpreted
as evidence of growing stress within
sedentary communities.12
A special type of mortuary practice
is indicated by the joint human and
dog burials in two graves, one in Ain
Mallaha69 and the other at Hayonim
Terrace.70 Both are interpreted as
marking a departure from the Paleolithic
vision of the natural world as a
dichotomy between humans and wild-
life.
Given the Natufians’ habit of placing
graves within their own sites and
then refilling them with material from
the pit and surrounding areas, only
objects found attached to skeletons
can be securely identified as grave
goods. Common grave goods included
head decorations, necklaces, bracelets,
belts, earrings, and pendants made
of marine shells, bone, teeth, and
beads. A few objects such as a bone
dagger (Hayonim cave), a bone figurine
of a young gazelle (Nahal Oren),
and a small model of a human head in
limestone (El-Wad) were related by
excavators to the buried individuals. It
should be stressed that decorated burials
particularly characterize the Early
Natufian. Finally, the suggestion that
differences in mortuary practices
should be viewed as reflecting social
hierarchy have recently been found to
be untenable.71,72
Lithic Assemblages
The production of stone tools is one
of the most conservative human activities.
Research on Upper Pleistocene
sites has demonstrated that it is almost
impossible to relate changes in
lithic technology and the morphology
of artifacts to environmental changes.
Therefore, specific characteristics of
knapping techniques, ways of snapping
bladelets, and types of retouch
among assemblages of Terminal Pleistocene
and Early Holocene age in the
Near East are employed in the search
for identifiable social entities.1,28 The
Natufian has thus been subdivided
into phases and regional groups based
on the presence or absence of products
of ‘‘microburin technique,’’ a specialized
blade-snapping method, and
the size and type of retouch of lunates
(backing versus Helwan). The average
length of lunates, which has also been
used as a chronological marker,73 has
recently been refined to include the
regional-ecological location of the
sites.74
The Natufian lithic industry is characterized
by extensively used cores
and the production of small, short,
wide bladelets and flakes. Among the
retouched pieces, frequencies of end
scrapers and burins fluctuate considerably.
Backed blades grade into the
retouched and backed bladelets, defined
as microliths. Microliths and geometrics
reach 40% or more in every
assemblage. In the Early Natufian, geometrics
include Helwan and backed
lunates, trapeze-rectangles, and triangles,
but in the Late Natufian backed
lunates generally dominate.12,34,73–76
Special tools that occur for the first
time in the Natufian are picks and
sickle blades. The first, considered the
forerunner of the axe-adzes group of
the Neolithic period, are 8 to 10 cm
long and bifacially or trifacially flaked.
The second, the sickle blades or glossy
pieces as they are known today, are
abundant in sites within the Natufian
homeland (Fig. 6). These blades bear a
gloss that covers a relatively wide area
on both faces. Experimental and microscopic
studies demonstrated that
these were used for harvesting cereals.77,78
The blades were hafted in bone
or, probably more often, wooden
handles. It is quite possible that they
can be interpreted as tools used in
early experiments in cereal cultivation.
The use of sickles instead of
beaters and baskets has the advantage
of maximizing the yield harvested from
a limited area.79–82 It seems that the
Research on Upper
Pleistocene sites has
demonstrated that it is
almost impossible to
relate changes in lithic
technology and the
morphology of artifacts
to environmental
changes.
164 Evolutionary Anthropology ARTICLES
Natufians adopted the use of sickles
for harvesting because of their need to
maximize yield and minimize time,
the reason being the limited availability
of fields of wild stands.3,82
Ground Stone Tools
Such tools, including bedrock mortars,
portable mortars, bowls of various
types, cupholes, mullers, and
pestles, occur in large numbers in
base-camp sites, but are not as abundant
in the more ephemerally occupied
camps. The boulder mortars,
sometimes called stone pipes, weigh
as much as 100 to 150 kg and are 70 to
80 cm deep. When broken in their
lowermost part, these objects were
placed in graves. An archeometric
study has indicated that basalt objects
in the Mount Carmel sites were
brought from the Golan Heights,83
about 100 km away. Microscopic observations
have demonstrated that ground
stone utensils were employed for food
processing as well as for crushing
burned limestone and red ochre.41,84
Among the grooved stones are whetstones
made of sandstone, which were
used for shaping bone objects. Shaft
straighteners, identified on the basis
of ethnographic comparisons, have a
deep, parallel-sided groove and bear
burning marks. These marks, which
resulted from straightening wooden
shafts, indicate the use of bows by the
Natufians.
Bone and Horncore Industry
The Natufian is marked by a bone
industry that is far richer in quantity
and contains more elaborate, varied
morphologies than does any earlier or
later Levantine archeological entity.85–87
Objects were made of bone
shafts and of teeth and horn-cores
from gazelles, wolves, fallow deer, roe
deer, and birds. Use-wear analysis indicates
that bone tools were used for
hideworking and basketry.63 Barbed
items have been reconstructed as parts
of hunting devices (spears or arrows),
hooks and gorgets for fishing, and
hafts for sickle blades. Bone beads and
pendants were shaped by grinding and
drilling.63 Many objects bear specific
decorations. Among these are the
carved hafts from El-Wad and Kebara
Cave with young ruminants at the
edge and the pieces from Hayonim
Cave bearing net patterns.47,58,88
Ornamentation and Art Objects
Body decorations and ornamentations
demonstrate variability between
and within sites, as well as change
over time. A variety of marine molluscs,
bone, greenstone, limestone pendants,
and beads were used by the
Natufians in headgear, necklaces, belts,
bracelets, and earrings (Fig. 6).
Marine shells for Natufian jewelry
were collected from the shores of the
Mediterranean Sea or, more rarely,
were brought from the Red Sea. Ain
Mallaha stands out for having a tusk
shell from the Atlantic ocean and a
freshwater bivalve from the Nile
river.41,89 Greenstone and malachite
beads were brought from as yet unidentified
localities in the Levant. Other
rare items include pieces of Anatolian
obsidian found at Ain Mallaha in a
Late Natufian context. The noticeable
differences in jewelry between the sites
is considered to indicate the existence
The Natufian is marked
by a bone industry that is
far richer in quantity and
contains more
elaborate, varied
morphologies than does
any earlier or later
Levantine archeological
entity.
Figure 5. An Early Natufian decorated skull from El-Wad, excavated by D. Garrod (photograph
by S. Burger, Peabody Museum).
ARTICLES Evolutionary Anthropology 165
of distinct group identities.67 Several
limestone slabs recovered from the
rounded structures inside Hayonim
Cave are incised, mostly with the ladder-pattern
motif interpreted as the
accumulated effects of notational
marks.90,91 On one large slab, the rough
form of a fish is deeply incised. Large
carved limestone slabs with the meander
pattern, also known from carved
basalt bowls, were uncovered in one of
the houses of Wadi Hammeh.27,56,88
Portable naturalistic and schematic
figurines made of bone and limestone
include carvings on sickle hafts and
isolated bone pieces (Fig. 7). Several
of these figurines depict young ungulates,
possibly gazelles.88 A limestone
figurine from the Nahal Oren site has
an owl at one end and a dog’s head at
the other. An additional item is a horn
core with a man’s head at one end and
a bovid’s head at the other end. This
combination of human and animal
might have emerged from similar ideological
changes that led to the joint
dog and human burials.70
Figurines that represent the human
body or face are rare; only a few, made
of limestone, have been found.92 The
exception is the Ain Sakkhri limestone
figurine, interpreted as representing a
mating couple. Zoomorphic figurines
include a tortoise, a kneeling gazelle,
and possibly a baboon.88 The attention
given to young ruminants93 and their
appearance as decoration on sickles is
rather curious, but perhaps represents
a totemic group idol.
Particular decorative patterns found
on both bone and stone objects include
the net, chevron (or zigzag), and
meander patterns. Most appear on
spatulas, stone bowls, shaft-straighteners,
and the rare ostrich-egg shell containers
found as broken pieces in the
Negev sites.54 Because these differ from
site to site, they may further our identification
of different Natufian groups.
For the time being, we know that their
frequencies are highest within the
Natufian homeland in the central Le-
vant.94
Subsistence
Most Natufian sites were excavated
before the introduction, in the late
1960s, of recovery techniques such as
systematic dry sieving and floatation.
However, even in recent excavations
water flotation has failed to retrieve
sufficient quantities of floral remains.
In some cases, the few grains found
were later dated by accelerator mass
spectrometry to recent times.95,96 The
poor preservation of vegetal remains
in Natufian sites within the Mediterranean
woodland resulted from the nature
of the prevailing terra rossa soil.
Occupational deposits in open-air sites
are soaked each winter, then dry up
and crack in summer. In the process,
plant remains are destroyed; charcoal,
small bones, and even lithics are subjected
to both downward and upward
movements. Better charcoal preservation
is noted in the desertic loess in the
Negev and drier deep deposits of sites
Figure 6. Natufian lithic, bone, and ground stone assemblage: 1, Helwan lunate; 2, lunate; 3,
triangle; 4 and 5, microburins (products of a special snapping technique); 6, truncated
bladelet; 7, borer; 8, burin; 9, Helwan sickle blade; 10, abruptly retouched sickle blade; 11, pick;
12 and 13, bone points; 14, decorated broken sickle haft; 15–19, bone pendants; 20, decorated
bone spatula; 21, pestle; 22, mortar; 23, deep mortar made of basalt; 24, Harif point. Note
that the ground stone tools have different scales than do the lithics and bone objects.
166 Evolutionary Anthropology ARTICLES
in the Lower Jordan Valley. However,
samples are still too small due to the
limited number and size of excavations.
The paucity of carbonized material
is also expressed in the relative
scarcity of charcoal radiocarbon dates.
Tools for food acquisition, such as
sickles, and food processors, such as
mortars, bowls, and pestles, are interpreted
as evidence for harvesting and
processing wild cereals and legumes.
The few available seeds support the
contention that pulses, cereals, almonds,
acorns, and other fruits were
gathered.18 The list of species collected
was probably even longer, as
can be deduced from the list of plant
remains from Ohalo II, the Late Paleolithic
site mentioned earlier. Similar
information comes from Tell Mureybet97
and the Epi-Paleolithic layers of
Abu Hureyra,44 which are dated to
Late Natufian age.
The idea that the Natufians were the
earliest agriculturalists was first suggested
by Garrod in 1932. Despite
later criticism, that idea was revived
by others80 and supported in part
by experimental studies of sickle
blades.77,78 It was also established that
systematic cultivation would have
caused the unintentional domestication
of wheat and barley.98,99 However,
even the degree of domestication of
cereals in the earliest Neolithic sites is
still questionable on the basis of the
morphological characteristics of carbonized
seeds and rachis fragments.100
A more cautious interpretation of these
findings is that Natufian communities
practiced intensive and extensive harvesting
of wild cereals as part of an
anticipated summer mobility pattern.
Good bone preservation in most sites
has made faunal evidence the subject
of numerous studies.101–106 Natufians
hunted gazelle and other game, depending
on the geographical location
of each site (Fig. 8). In the coastal
ranges, deer, cattle, and wild boar were
common, while in the steppic belt
equids and ibex were typical prey. The
attempt to explain the Natufian faunal
assemblages as the result of net hunting107
has not been well accepted,108
and does not conform to the ethnographic
evidence, which indicates that
such a technique is best suited for
forested areas where the degree of
visibility is rather low.109
Water fowl undoubtedly formed part
of the Natufian diet, especially in sites
along the Jordan Valley, where both
migratory and nesting ducks were
gathered during the stress seasons.110
Freshwater species of fish were caught
seasonally in the Hula Lake, as indicated
by thousands of fish vertebrae
retrieved at Ain Mallaha.111 Fishing
seems to have been less important
along the Mediterranean coast. However,
fish remains, though scarce, together
with the presence of bone gorgets
and hooks, indicate that old
excavation techniques often yield incomplete
information.
THE NATUFIAN AND THE
EMERGENCE OF NEOLITHIC
FARMER-HUNTER COMMUNITIES
The emergence of the Natufian entity
from a world of Levantine huntergatherers
is seen as resulting from
both economic and social circumstances.
On the one hand, climatic
improvements around 13,000 B.P. provided
a wealth of food resources. On
the other hand, contemporaneous
population growth in both the steppic
and desertic regions made any abrupt,
short-term climatic fluctuation a motivation
for human groups to achieve
control over resources. The establishment
of a series of sedentary Early
Figure 7. Natufian art objects: 1, decorated sickle haft (Kebara); 2, limestone human head
(El-Wad); 3 and 4, schematic human heads (Ain Mallaha); 5, decorated sickle haft (El-Wad); 6,
limestone figurines with two heads, a dog and an owl (Nahal Oren); 7, limestone animal head,
possibly a baboon (Nahal Oren); 8, decorated limestone slab (Wadi Hammeh 27) (after
Bar-Yosef58 and Noy88).
ARTICLES Evolutionary Anthropology 167
Natufian hamlets in a delineated homeland
is seen as a reaction to an abrupt
environmental change that necessitated
a shift of resource scheduling.
Previous patterns of semi-sedentism
among Late Pleistocene foragers gave
way to the acquisition of a firmer hold
over territories.
The circumstances surrounding
Natufian sedentism are interpreted in
various ways. Some researchers contend
that sedentism was enhanced by
the need to intensify cereal exploitation.1–4,112
Others suggest that sedentism
itself increased the propagation of
such annuals as cereals.13 Unfortunately,
as mentioned earlier, the storage
practices of the Natufians are
poorly known.
Archeologically, the criteria for recognizing
sedentism include the presence
of human commensals, such as
house mice, rats, and sparrows, at
higher frequencies among microfaunal
assemblages than in forager
sites.113–115 Another biological marker
is the study of cementum increments
on gazelle teeth, which indicate that
hunting by the inhabitants of Natufian
base hamlets took place in both winter
and summer. In addition, semi-permanent
hamlets can be noted by energy
expenditure, reflected in investments
in leveling slopes for building purposes,
the construction of houses, the
production of plaster, and the transport
of heavy undressed stones into
cave sites. Finally, the digging of graves
and rare underground storage pits, as
well as the shaping of large, heavy
mortars were activities that took place
in such base camps, but generally not
in locations that were exploited on a
short-term, seasonal basis.
The climatic crisis of the Younger
Dryas (ca. 11,000 to 10,300 B.P.) resulted
in environmental deterioration.
This climatic change, now recognized
globally, had an impact on the Natufian
population. It is suggested that
the two major outcomes of the cold
and dry conditions were a decrease in
the natural production of C3 plants,
such as the cereals,4 and a reduction in
the geographic distribution of natural
stands of wild cereals to the western
wing of the Fertile Crescent (Fig. 9).
Environmental exploitation by sedentary
Late Natufian communities as
well as by their neighboring foragers
further depleted plant and animal resources.115
Social reactions to these
new conditions differed within the
Near East (Fig. 9).
In the Negev and northern Sinai, the
Late Natufian improved their hunting
techniques with the invention of the
Harif point, an arrowhead that probably
was more efficient.36 Whereas the
lithic and bone industries of Harifian
sites are Late Natufian in nature, only
the existence of the Harif point (Fig. 5)
demonstrates the uniqueness of this
entity. Animal bones represent the
hunting of local fauna: gazelle, ibex,
hare, and perhaps wild sheep. Grinding
tools, mortars, and cup-holes indicate
the processing of unknown plant
food elements. Large collections of
marine shells demonstrate tight relationships
with both the Red Sea and
Mediterranean shores.41 The overall
territory of the Harifian, as estimated
from surveys, is about 8,000 km, but
could have been as large as 30,000 to
50,000 km2. However, given their archeological
disappearance within two
to three hundred years and the fact
that this area remained essentially uninhabited
for about one thousand radiocarbon
years, the Harifian is interpreted
as the unsuccessful effort of the
local Late Natufian population to adapt
to the prevailing Younger Dryas conditions
in their territory (Fig. 9).
In other areas, Natufian communities
responded to the climatic changes
by becoming more mobile, probably
returning to a more flexible scheduling
of resources. Several communities
maintained social relationships with
their original hamlets and returned
there to bury their dead, as shown by
the large number of secondary burials.53,72
The first experiments in systematic
cultivation most likely occurred
during the Younger Dryas. The first
Neolithic large villages, up to 2.5 hectares
in size, seem to have relied, if not
The establishment of a
series of sedentary Early
Natufian hamlets in a
delineated homeland is
seen as a reaction to an
abrupt environmental
change that
necessitated a shift of
resource scheduling.
Figure 8. Frequencies of large and medium size mammals in Natufian and Neolithic sites. Note
the dominance of gazelle in Natufian and PPNA sites and the shift to caprovines during the
Pre-Pottery Neolithic B.
168 Evolutionary Anthropology ARTICLES
on domesticated barley and wheat,18
then on planting their wild progenitors.100
No one claims today that these
early farmers were new people. In
fact, ample evidence demonstrates that
they were the descendants of the local
Natufian population, which had undergone
changes in material culture, social
organization, and daily life ways.
THE EARLY NEOLITHIC ENTITIES
‘‘Neolithic,’’ meaning ‘‘new stone
age,’’ was first used with respect to the
Near East in the twentieth century.
Jericho was a key site: it was there that
the excavations of K. Kenyon exposed
a Neolithic sequence without pottery,
which led to new terminology. Because
all the other components, and
especially the stone industry, resembled
the European assemblages
from which the designation ‘‘Neolithic’’
had originated, Kenyon suggested
the taxon Pre-Pottery Neolithic.
She further subdivided it on the basis
of the Jericho stratigraphy into PrePottery
Neolithic A and B.116 At the
same time, R. Braidwood suggested
an anthropologically oriented terminology,
which incorporated excavated
assemblages within a socio-economic
interpretation; e.g., ‘‘level of incipient
cultivation and domestication’’ and
‘‘level of primary village-farming communities.’’117,118
Finally, the French
school from Lyon adopted a subdivision
by time horizons.119,120
Early Neolithic farming communities
in the Levant were geographically
distributed along today’s boundary between
the Mediterranean and the
Irano-Turanian steppic vegetationalbelts.
However, the environmental conditions
during the early Holocene were
entirely different from those of today.
Hence, these sites were located within
the Mediterranean woodland, which
was, at that time, the richest in vegetal
and animal resources (Fig. 10). Recognition
that the early farming communities
were actually stretched along a
rather narrow north-to-south belt led
us to identify the Levantine Corridor
as the locus of the origins of agriculture.28
On both sides of that corridor,
in the coastal range on the west and
the steppic region in the east and
south, small bands of foragers continued
to survive (Fig. 10). Sites of these
hunter-gatherers were excavated in the
Anti-Lebanon mountains121 and in
southern Sinai.122 Both areas provide
ample evidence for the continuation
of old life ways and the adoption of
specific projectile tools from the neighboring
farmers.
The first manifestation of the cultural
change that heralded the ‘‘Neolithic
Revolution’’ is known in the Levant
as the Khiamian. This entity is
still poorly defined, in part because the
time span of its existence is hardly a
few centuries of radiocarbon years,
perhaps ca. 10,500 to 10,300/10,100
B.P. In addition, the available information
on the Khiamian was obtained
from very limited soundings and sites
where mixing with earlier layers is
likely to have occurred.123–126 The lithic
industry of the Khiamian comprises
the aerodynamically shaped el-Khiam
projectile points, asphalt-hafted sickle
blades, some microliths, and high frequencies
of perforators, a typical Neolithic
feature (Fig. 11). Bifacial or polished
celts, considered to be Neolithic
‘‘markers,’’ are absent from the Khiamian
contexts.
THE SULTANIAN ENTITY
We identify between 10,300 and
9,300 B.P. a few geographically delineated
entities. The Sultanian, the one
in the Jordan Valley, which includes
the neighboring hilly ranges on both
sides, is better known than those
farther north. The main sites (Fig. 11)
are Jericho,127 Gilgal,128 Netiv Hagdud,129,130
Gesher,131 Dra,65 and several
in the hilly region, including Hatoula,125
Iraq ed-Dubb,65 and Nahal
Oren.49 In the northern Levant, somewhat
similar contexts represent other
cultural entities. The main sites are
Mureybet and Jerf el Ahmar
(Syria),97,120 Qermez Dereh (Iraq),132
and the lower level at C¸ ayo¨nu¨ (Turkey).133
The following brief overview is
therefore based mainly on the SultaThe
first manifestation of
the cultural change that
heralded the ‘‘Neolithic
Revolution’’ is known in
the Levant as the
Khiamian.
Figure 9. A reconstructed vegetational map of the Younger Dryas period. The hatched area
delineates the belt in which wild cereals were present. Note the location of a few selected Late
Natufian and Early Neolithic sites. Data are based on Hillman.31 The location of lake pollen
cores is also shown.
ARTICLES Evolutionary Anthropology 169
nian sites, with additional information
from settlements elsewhere in the
Near East.
Site Size, Intrasite Variability, and
Settlement Pattern
The largest Neolithic sites, among
them Mureybet, Jericho, Netiv Hagdud,
Gilgal, and Dra, are at least three
to eight times larger than the largest
Natufian sites.2,4 Intrasite variability
indicates that there are clear differences
between the large villages
and the small hamlets. For example,
in Netiv Hagdud the dwellings are
large and oval, and each household
is probably made of two rooms.
There are open spaces between the
houses where some of the domestic
activities took place.129,134 Similar observations
can be made for Jericho
and Mureybet. Nahal Oren, however,
represents a small site where the
rounded houses are clustered together
like a compound of an extended fam-
ily.
Sultanian and other PPNA houses
are pit-houses, with stone foundations
and superstructures of unbaked mud
bricks, often with a plano-convex cross
section (Fig. 12). The use of mud bricks
along with considerable amounts of
organic substances resulted in the
rapid accumulation of deposits in Neolithic
mounds. Therefore, Neolithic deposits
generally have low frequencies
of artifacts per volume-unit when compared
to the previous Natufian sites.
Domestic hearths were small and
oval with cobble floors. The use of
heated rocks in cooking resulted in
abundant fire-cracked rocks, which
were uncommon in Natufian sites. Silos,
either small stone-built bins or
larger built-up mud-brick structures,
were found in every site.
The best example as yet of communal
building efforts are the walls and
tower of Jericho. Kenyon116 interpreted
these as parts of a defense
system against raids. However, Kenyon
ignored the fact that a tower that is
part of a defense system is usually
built on the outer face of the walls to
enable the protectors to shoot sideways
at the climbing attackers. An
alternative interpretation suggests that
the walls were erected mainly on the
western side of the site to protect the
settlement against mud flows and flash
floods135 (Fig. 12). In addition, a topographic
cross section through the entire
tell indicates that there was probably
only one tower. Although its
function is unknown, it could have
accommodated a small mud-brick
shrine on the top. Although unequivocal
evidence for public ritual is missing,
the open space north of the tower
may have been similar to the ‘‘plaza’’ in
C¸ ayo¨nu¨ (Turkey), which served as a
place for public gatherings.133
Sultanian Tool Kits
Lithic technology exhibits cultural
continuity from the Khiamian.136
Blades were manufactured essentially
for sickles and other cutting objects.
Projectiles included el-Khiam points
with additional varieties; perforators
are frequent. Axes-adzes with a working
edge formed by a transversal blow
and polished celts made their first
appearance during this time (Fig. 11).
A shift from the Natufian is evident
in the abundant pounding tools, including
slabs with cupholes, hand
stones, and rounded, shallow grinding
bowls. Only the rare mortar or deep
bowl continued the previous tradition
of heavy-duty kitchen equipment (Fig.
11).
Figure 10. A map of the Levant showing the distribution of known Pre-Pottery Neolithic A sites,
the area of the Levantine Corridor, and the presence of other socio-economic entities.
170 Evolutionary Anthropology ARTICLES
Mortuary Practices and Art
Objects
Most burials are single with no grave
goods. Skull removal, a practice begun
during the Late Natufian, was performed
only on adults; child burials
were left intact. The separated crania
were sometimes found in domestic
locales or special-purpose buildings. A
current interpretation views these skull
caches as having been formed through
public ritual aimed at negotiating
equality among the inhabitants of
these villages.137 The differentiation
along age lines probably reflects
changes in attitudes toward the dead
within the Early Neolithic society, and
perhaps is evidence for the veneration
of ancestors.120 In sum, it seems that a
long-term social value was attributed
to adults, as shown by the conservation
of their skulls, but not to children.
Additional changes in society are
expressed by the shaping of human
figurines from either limestone or clay
along gender lines (Fig. 13). Several
depict a kneeling female, while others
are of the ‘‘seated woman’’ type.138
Common interpretation views this
specification of gender, not evident in
the Natufian, as indicating the emerging
role of women in a cultivating
society. It is assumed that this major
shift brought about the cult of the
‘‘mother goddess’’ in later centuries.
Subsistence
Flotation procedures at sites in the
Levantine Corridor have produced
high frequencies of carbonized seeds
of barley, wheat, legumes, and other
plants.18,97–100,139,140 Unfortunately,
there is no agreement on the methods
humans used to acquire the seeds,
whether by intensive collection in the
wild, cultivation, or gathering animal
dung as fuel.18,99,100,141 The debate focuses
on the frequencies of certain
morphological features that are considered
to be signs of domesticated
species and whether these are, in fact,
the results of parching harvested wild
cereals when still green. Regardless of
whether they were cultivators or harvesters,
the geographic shift in settlement
pattern and the increasing site
size during the Early Neolithic are
sound indicators of a major socioeconomic
departure from the Natufian
way of life.
Early Neolithic village inhabitants
continued to gather wild fruits and
seeds and to hunt. Gazelle, equids, and
cattle were hunted in the middle Euphrates
area (Fig. 8); gazelle, fox, a few
fallow deer, wild boar, and wild cattle
Figure 11. A typical assemblage from a Pre-Pottery Neolithic A site in the southern Levant: 1 and
2, Khiam points; 3 and 4, Hagdud truncations; 5, awl on blade; 6, a tranchet bifacial axe; 7, a
sickle blade (type Beit Ta’amir); 8, grooved stone or a ‘‘shaft straightener’’; 9, limestone slab
with cup holes; 10, a limestone celt (after Bar-Yosef and Gopher129).
Flotation procedures at
sites in the Levantine
Corridor have produced
high frequencies of
carbonized seeds of
barley, wheat, legumes,
and other plants.
Unfortunately, there is no
agreement on the
methods humans used to
acquire the seeds,
whether by intensive
collection in the wild,
cultivation, or gathering
animal dung as fuel.
ARTICLES Evolutionary Anthropology 171
were the main game animals in the
Jordan Valley. Large numbers of birds,
especially ducks, were trapped by occupants
of all sites.130 Lizards and tortoises
were gathered as well. The overall
picture is that of a ‘‘broad-spectrum’’
subsistence strategy similar to that of
the Natufians.
Long-distance exchange is demonstrated
by the central Anatolian obsidian
found in Jericho and in smaller
quantities in Netiv Hagdud, Nahal
Oren, and Hatoula. No obsidian was
found in Gilgal or Gesher. Marine
shells were brought from the Mediterranean
coast and fewer from the Red
Sea. There is a clear shift in the types
selected for exchange. Glycymeris and
cowries become important, but Dentalium
shells, where excavated deposits
were sieved, are still common, as in
Natufian sites.
DISCUSSION
Most readers are familiar with the
different hypotheses that have been
offered as explanations for the emergence
of agriculture in the Near East.
The following is a brief summary. One
of the first proposals was made by
Raphael Pumpelly, an American geologist
who hypothesized that the warming
climate of the Holocene forced
people to settle near drying lakes. This
idea led him to initiate excavations at
the site of Anau in Turkmenistan, Central
Asia.3,141 The same idea was picked
up by V. G. Childe, who proposed what
today is called the ‘‘oasis hypothesis.’’
Childe asserted that the Holocene postglacial
warming resulted in increasing
densities of humans and animals in
river valleys, thereby motivating a new
subsistence strategy based on animal
domestication and cultivation.141 Robert
Braidwood and his associates
shifted their focus from the river valleys
to what today is the nuclear zone
in which wild cereals and legumes
grow,18,142 often referred to as the ‘‘hilly
flanks.’’ They excavated sites in northern
Iraq and southeastern Turkey.
Braidwood proposed that within the
evolving cultural contexts, technological
progress led to village life and the
ensuing domestication of plants and
animals. The climatic factor was omitted
from Braidwood’s model as a result
of field observations made by
H. E. Wright. Wright, a palynologist
and limnologist, recently conceded
that these observations were erroneous
and agreed that a greater role
should be attributed to climatic fluctuations.143
At the time, however,
Braidwood accepted the notion that
climatic fluctuations played only a minor
role, and therefore suggested that
food production did not begin at an
earlier period because ‘‘culture was
not ready.’’144
The role of increasing human populations
at the end of the Pleistocene
and the reaction of groups surviving in
marginal areas to climatic fluctuations
were prime stimuli in the writings
of Binford,145 Flannery,146 Cohen,147
Smith and Young,148 Hassan,149
and others. The idea of demographic
pressure, which had originated in
Childe’s writings, was explicitly expressed
within a cultural ecological
model. Evidence to support the importance
of this relative increase in human
population densities was derived
from new surveys and excavations accomplished
in the 1950s and 1960s
across the Near East.
Other scholars have attempted more
general explanations. Thus, D. Rindos150
viewed the emergence of agriculture
and the domestication of plants
as a long process of mutualism that
began with incidental domestication
and terminated with a fully developed
agricultural system. However, if this
process were truly a basic pattern of
behavior for all foragers, then agriculture
would have emerged independently
in every region of the world.
The evidence does not support this
hypothesis. Another approach proposed
by Hayden,151 termed the ‘‘competitive
feasting’’ model, emerged from
a growing interest in social factors.
Figure 12. PPNA pit houses excavated in Netiv Hagdud. The darker circular building in the
center was built of mud bricks and could have been a large silo.
172 Evolutionary Anthropology ARTICLES
Unfortunately, the archeological record
of the Levant indicates that the
surplus of food and precious commodities
needed for potlatch competition
was not available before the development
of agriculture but was, instead,
an outcome of that development.
Hayden’s model would better fit the
evidence for competition from the following
Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period
(ca. 9,300 to 7,800 B.P.) when large,
well-established villages occupied the
Fertile Crescent and beyond.
The explanatory model used in this
paper and others2–4,28,152 follows the
‘‘historical narrative explanation’’ proposed
by Flannery.153 It not only takes
into account the unique geographic
conditions of the Levant, but also combines
the archeological history of foragers,
their reconstructed social structure,
and their subsistence strategies
with environmental changes. The resulting
sequence makes the emergence
of cultivation, under these given
conditions, the optimal strategy for
semi-sedentary and sedentary hunter
gatherers. The regional conditions during
the Late Pleistocene included the
availability, predictability, and accessibility
of numerous edible annual seeds
such as cereals and legumes (r-resources)
and perennial plant resources,
essentially fruits, and the presence of
mostly stationary medium-sized ungulates
and cervids that did not require
the monitoring of large territories. The
result was dense spatial distribution of
combined resources that enabled foragers
to survive in biologically viable
populations in small territories.
The current trend to view climatic
fluctuations as a mechanism for triggering
cultural change is based on the
growing understanding that environmental
impacts are ‘‘screened’’ through
a cultural filter. In each region at a
given time, societies of hunter-gatherers
have had their own cultural filters
as much as they have had their own
kinship systems, cosmologies, and economic
and ideological adaptations to
particular features of their landscape.
Cultural filters are constructed through
particular group histories. Thus, different
human populations may react differently
in the face of environmental
crises. There is no need to seek one
single model to explain the origins of
agriculture.
Since the end of the Late Glacial
Maximum (ca. 14,500 B.P.), people
occupied every eco-zone in the
Near East. The Levant was the most
favorably inhabited belt. Desert oases
continued to accommodate huntergatherer
groups, but these populations
were highly mobile and thinly
distributed. In the coastal Levant,
semi-sedentism or severely reduced
mobility was already an established
settlement pattern among foragers.
Hence a short, cold, and abrupt crisis
at about 13,000 B.P., which was immediately
followed by an increase in precipitation
and an expansion of woodland
and parkland, had a major
impact. It made sedentism within a
certain ‘‘homeland’’ the most practical
settlement pattern, resulting in the
formation of the Early Natufian. The
technological innovations introduced
by the Natufians, such as sickles, picks,
and improved tools for archery, were
additions to an already existing Upper
Paleolithic inventory of utensils that
included simple bows, corded fibers,
and food processing tools such as mortars
and pestles. Demographic pressure
was therefore the outcome when
certain groups of foragers became sedentary
while others remained mobile.
This condition limited both groups in
their access to resources when further
climatic crises caused diminishing
Figure 13. Pre-pottery Neolithic A female figurines from Mureybet (1–3,5) and Netiv Hagdud (4).
Note that they are in two positions, sitting (2,4) and standing (1,3,5) (after Cauvin158; Bar-Yosef
and Gopher129).
ARTICLES Evolutionary Anthropology 173
yields in natural stands of cereals and
fruits. The ‘‘packing of territories’’154
describes the Late Pleistocene archeological
situation, which is now well
known from numerous surveys and
excavations of sites across the Levant.
Another major crisis was the ‘‘Younger
Dryas,’’ a period of cold, dry climatic
conditions that lasted for centuries.
Rapid reduction in the size of the
lushest vegetation belts as well as reduction
in the yields of natural stands
of C3 plants such as cereals forced
certain human groups to change their
organizational strategies, including the
ways they obtained carbohydrate resources.
Experimental planting, shifts
in the location of settlements, and the
clearing of land patches resulted in
establishment of the Early Neolithic
(commonly labelled PPNA) villages,
first in the western part, or the Levantine
wing, of the Fertile Crescent. Other
groups in the steppic belt reacted to
these conditions by increasing their
mobility.
The rapid return of wetter conditions
around 10,000 B.P. triggered the
expansion of numerous lakes and
ponds, which then facilitated the cultivation
of various annuals along their
shores, especially in the Levantine Corridor.
From that time onward, large
villages existed, with estimated populations
of 300 to 500 individuals. Each
of these villages was inhabited by an
entire biologically viable population,
thereby reducing the need to maintain
a mating network that stretched over
long distances. Furthermore, within
such large communities, the need for
social cohesion motivated the maintenance
of public ceremonies in addition
to domestic rituals, the building
of shrines, and the keeping of space
for public activities.
Continued amelioration of climatic
conditions during the PPNB (the next
two-and-a-half radiocarbon millennia)
enabled not only socio-economic
success, but also the rather rapid expansion
of agricultural communities
and groups of farmers into neighboring
regions. From that point on, the
‘‘multiplier effect’’155,156 of technological,
social, and economic build-up
played an important role in the Near
East. The effects were numerous: the
creation of food surpluses, additional
population increases, the erection of
temples in villages for public use, increasing
demands for precious commodities,
and possibly the eventual
appearance of competitive feasting.
In conclusion, the ‘‘Neolithic Revolution’’
cannot be understood without
research into its origins in the Natufian
culture. The emergence of farming
communities is seen as a response
to the effects of the Younger Dryas on
the Late Natufian culture in the Levantine
Corridor. The beginning of intentional
widespread cultivation was the
only solution for a population for
whom cereals had become a staple
food. Domestication of a suite of
founder crops came as the unintentional,
unconscious result of this process.
In retrospect, the stability of Early
Natufian lifeways underwent rapid
changes during the Late Natufian.
These changes were expressed in the
abandonment of numerous sites and
the establishment of sites in the steppic
zone. Natufian groups on the Mediterranean
side of the hilly area were
harvesting wild cereals in natural
stands along the Jordan Valley on a
seasonal basis. If yields of natural
stands decreased during the Younger
Dryas, the motivation for intentional
cultivation could have increased. Establishing
sedentary communities
along the Jordan Valley and the Damascus
basin enabled the first farmers
to use flat alluvial lands as fields. This
shift in settlement pattern suggests
that the primary consideration for site
location choice was related to cereal
cultivation and permanant water
sources, and not necessarily to the
optimal foraging of vegetal and animal
resources. The success of the Neolithic
farming communities under the
favorable climatic conditions of the
early Holocene enabled them to expand
along the Levantine Corridor
into Anatolia and neighboring re-
gions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to A. Belfer-Cohen, N.
Goren-Inbar, N. Goring-Morris, E.
Hovers, and E. Tchernov, my colleagues
at the Hebrew University, Avi
Gopher (Tel Aviv University), my codirector
for the excavations in Netiv
Hagdud, F. Valla and R. Meadow (Harvard
University), with whom I recently
co-authored a summary of the origins
of agriculture in the Near East, for my
many useful discussions with them. In
addition, I thank J. Fleagle, A. BelferCohen,
D. Henry, M. Fleischman, N.
Ornstein, and three anonymous reviewers
for their comments. Needless
to say, I am the only one responsible
for any shortcomings of this paper.
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