The Natufians in the Mesolithic/Neolithic Levant
The Natufian culture which existed about 12,000 years ago in the Levant, has been the subject of various archeological investigations as the Natufian culture is generally believed to be the source of the European and North African Neolithic.
The Natufians was an Epipaleolithic culture that existed from 13,000 to 9,800 years ago in the Levant, a region in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was unusual in that it was sedentary, or semi-sedentary, before the introduction of agriculture.
The Natufian communities are possibly the ancestors of the builders of the first Neolithic settlements of the region, which may have been the earliest in the world.
There is some evidence for the deliberate cultivation of cereals, specifically rye, by the Natufian culture, at the Tell Abu Hureyra site, the site for earliest evidence of agriculture in the world. Generally, though, Natufians made use of wild cereals. Animals hunted included gazelles.
The jury is still out on who holds the title for ‘the first farmers’ as the East Asians are also looking good for it, but Turkey and the Zagros region is more likely to be the home of western agriculture, not Israel or Syria.
It’s rather telling that the very earliest Natufian agricultural sites are right on the edges of their territory (Abu Hureyra) and growing a more Northerly crop. They gathered wild grains for a long time after farming was introduced.
They seem to share some cultural ties to the Turkish culture of the time, such as removing and decorating skulls, and burying their dead inside their houses. They also have the habit of incisor evulsion shared with the Ibero Maurussian Culture of Morocco. Interestingly, their genetic legacy in the near East seems to be a male contribution (v13), but no L Mt Lineages came out of Africa to accompany it.
According to Bar-Yosef the Natufian culture emerged from the mixing of the Geometric Kebaran (indigenous to the Levant) and the Mushabian (also indigenous to the Levant).
The Emirian culture
The Upper Palaeolithic period is dated in the Levant to ca. 48,000–20,000. Emirian culture was a culture that existed in the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine) between the Middle Paleolithic and the Upper Paleolithic periods.
The Emirian culture apparently developed from the local Mousterian without rupture, keeping numerous elements of the Levalloise-Mousterian, together with the locally typical (but not frequent) point known as Emireh point.
There are also numerous stone blade tools, including some curved knives similar to those found in the Chatelperronian culture of Western Europe. According to Dorothy Garrod, the Emireh point, known from several sites in Israel, is the hallmark of this culture.
The Emirian eventually evolved into the Antelian culture, an Upper Paleolithic phase of the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine) that evolves from Emirian, which represents the transition between the Middle Paleolithic and the Upper Paleolithic in the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine).
The Antelian culture is still of Levalloise tradition, but with some Aurignacian influences. The most important innovation in the Antelian period is the incorporation of some typical elements of Aurignacian, like some types of burins and narrow blade points that resemble the European type of Font-Yves.
The Aurignacian culture is an archaeological culture of the Upper Palaeolithic, located in Europe and southwest Asia. It lasted broadly within the period from ca. 45,000 to 35,000 years ago (about 37,000 to 27,000 years ago on the uncalibrated radiocarbon timescale; between ca. 47,000 and 41,000 years ago using the most recent calibration of the radiocarbon timescale).
The Kebarian culture
The Kebaran culture (18,000 to 10,000 BC), an archaeological culture in the Eastern Mediterranean area named after its type site, Kebara Cave south of Haifa, is preceded by the Athlitian phase of the Antelian, and is the last Upper Paleolithic phase of the Levant (Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel.
Situated in the Terminal Pleistocene, the Kebaran is classified as an Epipaleolithic society (ca. 20,000-9,500 BC) characterized by significant cultural variability and wide spread of the microlithic technologies.
The Kebarans were characterized by small, geometric microliths, and were thought to lack the specialized grinders and pounders found in later Near Eastern cultures.
The Kebaran were a highly mobile nomadic population, composed of hunters and gatherers in the Levant and Sinai areas who utilized microlithic tools.
The Kebaran people are believed to have practiced dispersal to upland environments in the summer, and aggregation in caves and rockshelters near lowland lakes in the winter. This diversity of environments may be the reason for the variety of tools found in their toolkits.
The culture is characterised by the earliest collecting of wild cereals, known due to the uncovering of grain grinding tools. It was the first step towards the Neolithic Revolution. They are generally thought to have been ancestral to the later Natufian culture that occupied much of the same range.
The Mushabian culture
The Mushabian culture (alternately, Mushabi or Mushabaean) is an Archaeological culture suggested to have originated east of the Levantine Rift Valley c. 14,000 BC in the Middle Epipaleolithic period.
Although the Mushabian industry was once thought to have originated along the Nile Valley prior to migrating to the Levant, due to similar industries demonstrated among archaeological sites in both regions but with the Nile valley sites predating those found in the Sinai regions of the Levant, it is now known to have originated in the previous lithic industries of the Levant.
The Natufian culture
The Mushabian culture of the Negev and Sinai, which are sometimes distinguished from the Kebaran, is sometimes seen as having played a role in the development of the Natufian, which developed in the same region as the earlier Kebaran complex, and is generally seen as a successor which developed from at least elements within that earlier culture.
There has been some bickering over their race, as they show a mix of features. Unfortunately there haven’t been that many burials found, so the sample sizes have been a bit to small to make definite conclusions about who they were. They seem to show a mix of racial features, and this varies in each era and site, so there was probably a fairly fluid population at that time.
The Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert were formidable barriers to gene flow between Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. But Europe was periodically accessible to Africans due to fluctuations in the size and climate of the Sahara. At the Strait of Gibraltar, Africa and Europe are separated by only 15 km of water.
At the Suez, Eurasia is connected to Africa forming a single land mass. The Nile river valley, which runs from East Africa to the Mediterranean Sea served as a bidirectional corridor in the Sahara desert, that frequently connected people from Sub-Saharan Africa with the peoples of Eurasia.
The migration of farmers from the Middle East into Europe is believed to have significantly influenced the genetic profile of contemporary Europeans.
Although a migration of people from Africa bringing E-M78 lineages into the Levant took place c. 14,700 years ago it as yet cannot be linked with any of the Levantine cultures at the time (Hamran, Mushabian, Ramonian, Geometric Kebaran) or later (Natufian, Harifian, Khiamian) since all are known to have originated in the Levant.
Since a material culture cannot be connected with the E-M78 immigrants into the Levant it is likely they were assimilated into the various Levantine cultures beginning with the Ramonian culture, which was present in the Sinai 14,700 years ago.
This migration coincided with the population overflow in the Sinai and Negev that caused the Geometric Kebarans to fall back to the Mediterranean core area which in turn caused them to develop the Natufian culture as a result of the population increase in the Mediterranean park forest.
The Sub-Saharan influences detected in the Natufian samples is associated with the migration of E1b1b lineages from East Africa to the Levant and then into Europe. E1b1b1 lineages are found throughout Europe, but are distributed along a South-to-North cline, with a E1b1b1a mode in the Balkans.
Entering the late mesolithic Natufian culture, the E1b1b1a2 (E-V13) sub-clade has been associated with the spread of farming from the Middle East into Europe either during or just before the Neolithic transition.
Recently, it has been proposed that E3b originated in sub-Saharan Africa and expanded into the Near East and northern Africa at the end of the Pleistocene. E3b lineages would have then been introduced from the Near East into southern Europe by immigrant farmers, during the Neolithic expansion.
A Mesolithic population carrying Group III lineages with the M35/M215 mutation expanded northwards from sub-Saharan to North Africa and the Levant. The Levantine population of farmers that dispersed into Europe during and after the Neolithic carried these African Group III M35/M215 lineages, together with a cluster of Group VI lineages characterized by M172 and M201 mutations.
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”.
Ofar 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.” There has also been evidence that parthenocarpic figs were imported by humans from the direction of Egypt or Northern Sudan in this period.
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.
Anthropologist C. Loring Brace in a recent study on cranial metric traits however, was also able to identify a “clear link” to North African populations for early Natufians based on his observation of gross anatomical similarity with extant populations found mostly in the Sahara.
Brace believes that these populations later became assimilated into the broader continuum of Southwest Asian populations. According to Brace they were slightly closer to the Eurasian population, and all the Sub Saharan traits seem to vanish before the beginning of the Neolithic farming era.
Modern analyses comparing 24 craniofacial measurements reveal a predominantly cosmopolitan population within the pre-Neolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age Fertile Crescent, supporting the view that a diverse population of peoples occupied this region during these time periods.
In particular, evidence demonstrates the presence of North European, Central European, Saharan and some Sub-Saharan African presence within the region, especially among the Epipalaeolithic Natufians of Israel.
These studies further argue that over time the Sub-Saharan influences would have been “diluted” out of the genetic picture due to interbreeding between Neolithic migrants from the Near East and indigenous hunter-gatherers whom they came in contact with.
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