The Natufian culture and the first sedentary hunter-gatherers
- Date
- c. 15,000 – 11,500 years ago (c. 13,000–9500 BCE)
- Category
- Social & demographic
- Region
- Levant (Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
In the Levant — modern Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria — the Natufian culture of the Late Epipaleolithic marked a decisive break from the mobile foraging that had defined humanity for hundreds of millennia.
Living in a comparatively rich Mediterranean environment, Natufian communities built durable dwellings and remained in one place for much or all of the year, becoming among the earliest known sedentary or semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers anywhere on Earth. They harvested wild cereals with composite flint-bladed sickles, ground seeds with stone mortars and pestles, hunted gazelle and stored food. Crucially, this sedentism preceded farming: the Natufians were settling down before they domesticated plants or animals, overturning older models in which agriculture caused settlement rather than the reverse. Their dense communities, elaborate burials with shell and bone ornaments, and accumulation of heavy ground-stone equipment set social and economic conditions from which the Neolithic Revolution would later emerge in the same region. The Natufians thus form a pivotal bridge between the Paleolithic foraging world and the farming societies that followed.
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Related social & demographic events
- Eynan (Ain Mallaha): an early permanent village of stone housesc. 14,300 – 12,200 years ago (c. 12,300–10,200 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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