For decades, paleontologists and archaeologists have believed that, about 10,000 years ago, people living now in what is now Syria and Turkey discovered agriculture and forsook the nomadic lifestyle of their ancestors for the settled lives of farmers—a development that would during the following millennia lead to the creation of cities, and later states and empires. But that story is contradicted by the discoveries made over the past thirteen years by the Israeli archaeologist Leore Grosman at a site known as Nahal Ein Gev, inhabited by a prehistoric people known as Natufians. Matti Friedman writes:
Twelve thousand years ago, long before the beginning of recorded history, a group of perhaps 200 people lived in a small village by a stream flowing into the Sea of Galilee, in what today is northern Israel. The villagers hunted gazelle and hares, fished for carp, built stone houses, and buried their dead in a cemetery next to their homes. When I hiked to the site early one morning, it was easy to imagine them: a few figures setting off with nets to the lakeshore, others walking toward the hills with bows and arrows to look for game, and more down by the riverbank, spinning thread or crushing barley, shooing children out of the way—a community waking up together and getting to work, unaware of their position at the dawn of a new age.
The village [is] larger and more advanced than any Natufian site previously excavated. It was inhabited for at least 200 years and dated to the period just before the Natufians, and the village itself, disappeared for reasons that still aren’t clear. It seemed almost too advanced to be Natufian at all, and some scholars argued that it had to date from the later Neolithic period: it featured stone houses and an orderly cemetery, and it was located on open ground, without any connection to caves, as was often true of earlier settlements.
It’s not that Grosman disagrees that people figured out how to harness grain mutations in southeastern Turkey 2,000 years later. But she sees that as a late stage of the process, not the beginning, and as more of an elaboration than the breakthrough itself. The leap, in her eyes, was from nomadism to living in one place, harvesting plants, and building a society bigger than an extended family. This shift is visible at Nahal Ein Gev, she believes, and this change made possible the invention of agriculture—not the other way around.
Read more on Smithsonian: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-did-humans-start-settling-down-180982328/