Eynan (Ain Mallaha): an early permanent village of stone houses
- Date
- c. 14,300 – 12,200 years ago (c. 12,300–10,200 BCE)
- Category
- Social & demographic
- Region
- Levant (Upper Jordan Valley, Israel)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
At Eynan (Ain Mallaha) in the Upper Jordan Valley, Natufian foragers built one of the earliest known permanent settlements, occupied across several phases over roughly two millennia.
Each phase featured around fifty substantial semi-subterranean circular houses with stone foundations, paved floors and stone-lined central hearths, set among open areas and storage pits. The scale and solidity of the architecture — covering some 2,000 square metres — indicate year-round occupation by a sizeable community, a radical departure from the temporary camps of earlier foragers. Burials placed close to or within the dwellings, some richly adorned with shell, bone and stone ornaments, reveal emerging differences in social standing and a new relationship between the living and their ancestors. One famous interment involved a person buried alongside a puppy, an early hint of the bond between humans and dogs. Eynan demonstrates that monumental investment in permanent housing, food storage and place-bound community life began among hunter-gatherers, laying social foundations on which Neolithic village life would later be built.
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Related social & demographic events
- The Natufian culture and the first sedentary hunter-gatherersc. 15,000 – 11,500 years ago (c. 13,000–9500 BCE)
- Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appears in Africac. 300,000 years ago
- Rise of the Yamnaya Culture and Steppe Pastoralismc. 3300 BCE
- Uruk becomes the world's first cityc. 4000–3100 BCE
- Arrival of farming in Britain and Ireland and the rise of megalithsc. 4000 BCE
- Çatalhöyük and the great Neolithic towns of Anatoliac. 7100 – 5950 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
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