Fall 2017, Cover Stories, Daily News
Archaeologists revise chronology of the last hunter-gatherers in the Near East
Tue, Dec 05, 2017
UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN - FACULTY OF HUMANITIES—New research by a team of scientists and archaeologists based at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the University of Copenhagen suggests that the 15,000-year-old 'Natufian Culture' could live comfortably in the steppe zone of present-day eastern Jordan - this was previously thought to be either uninhabitable or only sparsely populated.
The hunter-gatherers of the Natufian Culture, which existed in modern-day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria between c. 14,500 - 11,500 years ago, were some of the first people to build permanent houses and tend to edible plants. These innovations were probably crucial for the subsequent emergence of agriculture during the Neolithic era. Previous research had suggested that the centre of this culture was the Mount Carmel and Galilee region, and that it spread from here to other parts of the region. The new study by the Copenhagen-Weizmann team, published in Scientific Reports, challenges this 'core region' theory.
https://popular-archaeology.com/issue/fall-2017/article/archaeologists-revise-chronology-of-the-last-hunter-gatherers-in-the-near-east
