SOCIETY

Settling Down Before Farming

~14,500 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

In the Levant, around 14,500 years ago, Natufian hunter-gatherers began living year-round in hamlets of round stone houses, with heavy mortars, storage, cemeteries, and refuse of the kind only a permanent home accumulates. No crop was yet domesticated: wild cereals, wetland tubers, gazelle and fish sustained settled life, and some communities stayed put even through the cold snap that followed.

Why it matters

Home is older than harvest. The village, the cemetery beside it, the commitment to one place and its dead, all of it was invented by foragers, and agriculture later grew inside this sedentary world rather than creating it. Property, crowding, stored surplus and the social frictions they breed take shape here, among the last hunter-gatherers of the Levant.

Dating & uncertainty

The Natufian spans roughly 15,000 to 11,700 years ago; this entry is anchored at the emergence of the first sedentary hamlets. How continuously each site was occupied is judged indirectly, from commensal species, seasonal growth marks and plant remains, and it varied from valley to valley.

Sources

1. Bar-Yosef & Belfer-Cohen (1989), Journal of World Prehistory · The origins of sedentism and farming communities in the Levantdoi:10.1007/bf00975111
2. Grosman et al. (2016), PLoS ONE · Nahal Ein Gev II, a Late Natufian community at the Sea of Galileedoi:10.1371/journal.pone.0146647
3. Proserpio et al. (2026), Vegetation History and Archaeobotany · Evolution of plant exploitation strategies of Early and Late Natufian hunter-gatherers at Shubayqa 1 (14,600-11,500 cal BP), Black Desert of Jordandoi:10.1007/s00334-026-01138-y

Our species’ history as one day

22:53:421 h 6 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day