Natufian culture
The Natufian culture is an archaeological culture of the late Epipalaeolithic Near East in West Asia from 15–11,500 Before Present. The culture was unusual in that it supported a sedentary or semi-sedentary population even before the introduction of agriculture. Natufian communities may be the ancestors of the builders of the region's first Neolithic settlements, which may have been the earliest in the world. Some evidence suggests deliberate cultivation of cereals, specifically rye, by the Natufian culture at Tell Abu Hureyra, the site of the earliest evidence of agriculture in the world.
The world's oldest known evidence of the production of bread-like foodstuff has been found at Shubayqa 1, a 14,400-year-old site in Jordan's northeastern desert, 4,000 years before the emergence of agriculture in Southwest Asia. In addition, the oldest known evidence of possible beer-brewing, dating to approximately 13,000 BP, was found in Raqefet Cave on Mount Carmel, although the beer-related residues may be a result of spontaneous fermentation.
Generally, though, Natufians exploited wild cereals and hunted animals, notably mountain gazelles. Archaeogenetic analysis has revealed derivation of later Levantines primarily from Natufians, along with substantial later gene flow from Anatolia.
Dorothy Garrod coined the term Natufian based on her excavations at the Shuqba Cave at Wadi Natuf.
Discovery
The Natufian culture was discovered by British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod during her excavations of Shuqba Cave in the Judaean Mountains of Mandatory Palestine in the Cisjordan, now the Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate of Palestine. Before the 1930s, the majority of archaeological work taking place in Palestine was biblical archaeology focused on historic periods, and little was known about the region's prehistory.In 1928, Garrod was invited by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem to excavate Shuqba Cave, where prehistoric stone tools had been discovered by Père Mallon four years earlier. She found a layer sandwiched between the Upper Paleolithic and Bronze Age deposits characterised by the presence of microliths. She identified this with the Mesolithic, a transitional period between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic well-represented in Europe but which had not yet been found in West Asia. A year later, when she discovered similar material at el Wad, Garrod suggested the name "the Natufian culture" after the Wadi Natuf, which runs close to Shuqba.
Over the next two decades, Garrod found Natufian material at several of her pioneering excavations in the Mount Carmel region, including el-Wad, Kebara and Tabun, as did the French archaeologist René Neuville, firmly establishing the Natufian culture in the regional prehistoric chronology. As early as 1931, both Garrod and Neuville drew attention to the presence of stone sickles in Natufian assemblages and the possibility that this represented a very early agriculture.
Dating
places the Natufian culture at an epoch from the terminal Pleistocene to the very beginning of the Holocene, a time period between 12,500 and 9,500 BC.The period is commonly split into two subperiods: Early Natufian and Late Natufian. The Late Natufian most likely occurred in tandem with the Younger Dryas. The Levant hosts more than a hundred kinds of cereals, fruits, nuts, and other edible parts of plants, and the flora of the Levant during the Natufian period was not the dry, barren, and thorny landscape of today, but rather woodland.
Precursors and associated cultures
The Natufian developed in the same region as the earlier Kebaran culture. It is generally seen as a successor, which evolved out of elements within that preceding culture. There were also other industries in the region, such as the Mushabian culture of the Negev and the Sinai Peninsula, which are sometimes distinguished from the Kebaran culture or believed to have been involved in the evolution of the Natufian culture.More generally there has been discussion of the similarities of these cultures with those found in coastal North Africa. Graeme Barker notes there are: "similarities in the respective archaeological records of the Natufian culture of the Levant and of contemporary foragers in coastal North Africa across the late Pleistocene and early Holocene boundary". According to Isabelle De Groote and Louise Humphrey, Natufians practiced the Iberomaurusian and Capsian custom of sometimes extracting their maxillary central incisors.
Ofer Bar-Yosef has argued that there are signs of influences coming from North Africa to the Levant, citing the microburin technique and "microlithic forms such as arched backed bladelets and La Mouillah points." But recent research has shown that the presence of arched backed bladelets, La Mouillah points, and the use of the microburin technique was already apparent in the Nebekian industry of the Eastern Levant. And Maher et al. state that, "Many technological nuances that have often been always highlighted as significant during the Natufian were already present during the Early and Middle EP and do not, in most cases, represent a radical departure in knowledge, tradition, or behavior."
Authors such as Christopher Ehret have built upon the little evidence available to develop scenarios of intensive usage of plants having built up first in North Africa, as a precursor to the development of true farming in the Fertile Crescent, but such suggestions are considered highly speculative until more North African archaeological evidence can be gathered. In fact, Weiss et al. have shown that the earliest known intensive usage of plants was in the Levant 23,000 years ago at Ohalo II on the shores of the Sea of Galilee by Kinneret.
Anthropologist C. Loring Brace cross-analysed the craniometric traits of Natufian specimens with those of various ancient and modern groups from the Near East, Africa and Europe. The Late Pleistocene Epipalaeolithic Natufian sample was described as problematic due to its small size, as well as the lack of a comparative sample from the Natufians' putative descendants in the Neolithic Near East, such as the PPNB. Nonetheless, Brace observed that the Natufian fossils lay between those of the Niger–Congo-speaking series included and the other samples, which he suggested may point to a Sub-Saharan influence in their constitution. Subsequent ancient DNA analysis of Natufian skeletal remains by Lazaridis et al. instead found that the specimens were a mix of 50% Basal Eurasian ancestral component and 50% West Eurasian Unknown Hunter Gatherer related to the western hunter-gatherers of Europe. Natufians have also been described by other anthropologists as a Proto-Mediterranean population, being similar to the Kebarans.
According to Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen, "It seems that certain preadaptive traits, developed already by the Kebaran and Geometric Kebaran populations within the Mediterranean park forest, played an important role in the emergence of the new socioeconomic system known as the Natufian culture."
Settlements
Settlements occur mostly in Israel and the Palestinian territories. This could be deemed the core zone of the Natufian culture, but Israel is a place that has been excavated more frequently than other places hence the greater number of sites. During the years more sites have been found outside the core zone of Israel and the Palestinian territories stretching into what now is Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula and the Negev desert. The settlements in the Natufian culture were larger and more permanent than in preceding ones. Some Natufian sites had stone built architecture; Ain Mallaha is an example of round stone structures. Cave sites are also seen frequently during the Natufian culture. El Wad is a Natufian cave site with occupation in the front part of the cave also called the terrace. Some Natufian sites were located in forest/steppe areas and others near inland mountains. The Natufian settlements appear to be the first to exhibit evidence of food storage; not all Natufian sites have storage facilities, but they have been identified at certain sites. Natufians are also suggested to have visited Cyprus, requiring travel over significant distances of water.Material culture
Lithics
The Natufian had a microlithic industry centered on short blades and bladelets. The microburin technique was used. Geometric microliths include lunates, trapezes, and triangles. There are backed blades as well. A special type of retouch is characteristic for the early Natufian. In the late Natufian, the Harif-point, a typical arrowhead made from a regular blade, became common in the Negev. Some scholars use it to define a separate culture, the Harifian.Sickle blades also appear for the first time in the Natufian lithic industry. The characteristic sickle-gloss shows that they were used to cut the silica-rich stems of cereals, indirectly suggesting the existence of incipient agriculture. Shaft straighteners made of ground stone indicate the practice of archery. There are heavy ground-stone bowl mortars as well.
Art
The Ain Sakhri lovers, a carved stone object held at the British Museum, is the oldest known depiction of a couple having sex. It was found in the Ain Sakhri cave in the Judean desert. A Natufian clay figurine uncovered from Nahal Ein Gev II, shows that prehistoric artists also used intimate, intertwined bodies to express spiritual beliefs and human–animal relationships.Burials
Natufian grave goods are typically made of shell, teeth, bones, and stone. There are pendants, bracelets, necklaces, earrings, and belt-ornaments as well.In 2008, the 12,400–12,000 cal BC grave of an apparently significant Natufian female was discovered in a ceremonial pit in the Hilazon Tachtit cave in northern Israel. Media reports referred to this person as a "shaman" or "witch doctor." The burial contained the remains of at least three aurochs and 86 tortoises, all of which are thought to have been brought to the site during a funeral feast. The body was surrounded by tortoise shells, the pelvis of a leopard, forearm of a boar, a wingtip of a golden eagle, and skull of a beech marten.