The first permanent villages

The story

Staying in one place

For almost all their history, human beings were nomads. They followed the herds, gathered fruit in the right seasons and changed camp when the food nearby ran out. A hut was a temporary shelter, something to leave without regret. Then, in one corner of the world, someone decided to stay. It was not a sudden choice and it did not involve everyone, but it marked a turning point: it is the moment when human history begins to put down roots.

That place is the Near East, in particular the region that today includes Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and western Syria. The people we are talking about are called Natufians by archaeologists, after a valley, the Wadi en-Natuf, in the West Bank, where the British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod found in 1928 a cave with traces of their culture. The Natufians lived between about 15,000 and 11,500 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, when the climate was becoming warmer and wetter.

The round houses of Ain Mallaha

The most studied site is called Ain Mallaha (in Hebrew Eynan), near an ancient lake in northern Israel. Here, about 12,000 to 14,000 years ago, archaeologists found the remains of dozens of round houses, six to nine metres across, with stone walls and a floor dug a little below ground level. Above there was probably a roof of branches and reeds. Inside there are hearths, pits for storing food, stone grinders. Between the houses there are burials: the dead were laid close to where people lived, sometimes under the floor.

Living like this all year round needs a few things: food available in every season, water nearby, the chance to store supplies. The Near East of the time offered all of this. There were oak woods, with acorns and almonds; meadows of wild cereals such as barley and wheat; lakes with fish; gazelles to hunt. Not all Natufian sites were occupied all year round, and scholars argue about how settled they really were. But at least in some places a settled life was probably already normal.

What they ate and how they worked

The Natufians did not yet farm, but they gathered wild cereals in large quantities. We know this from their tools: bone sickles with little flint blades set into them, which show a special shine, left by the cut blades of grass; stone mortars and pestles for grinding the seeds. At a site in Jordan called Shubayqa 1, in 2018, charred remains of a kind of flatbread were found, made with ground wild cereals and roots, about 14,400 years old: the oldest bread known. In a cave on Mount Carmel, Raqefet, archaeologists have found traces of an alcoholic drink like beer, made from fermented cereals, about 13,000 years old. It may have been served at feasts and rites after a funeral.

They also made beautiful objects: necklaces of shells and animal teeth, stone figurines, polished bowls. At Hilazon Tachtit, in Galilee, a grave about 12,000 years old was found with an elderly woman surrounded by dozens of tortoise shells (fifty according to the first publication) and the bones of various animals, including a leopard's pelvis: perhaps a person of great standing in the community. In another grave at Ain Mallaha an elderly person was buried with a puppy, held close to her: one of the first signs of affection between humans and dogs.

Towards farming

Towards the end of the period the climate changed again. Around 12,900 years ago a dry cold returned, which lasted more than a thousand years and which scientists call the Younger Dryas. Many wild cereals became rare. The inhabitants, by now rooted in villages, were forced to find solutions: to move, to look for other resources, or to help plants grow by sowing and tending fields. For some groups this was the road to agriculture. It is not certain that it happened this way, because the data are still few, and some researchers think that cultivation began earlier or in other ways. But the link between villages and fields is clear: the first farmers already lived in settled communities, descendants of peoples like the Natufians.