Natufian culture
Years: 12500BCE - 9500BCE
The Natufian culture is a Mesolithic culture that exists in the Levant, a region in the Eastern Mediterranean.
It is unusual in that it is 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 make use of wild cereals.
Animals hunted include gazelles.
The term "Natufian" was coined by Dorothy Garrod who studied the Shuqba cave in Wadi an-Natuf, Israel, about halfway between Tel Aviv and Ramallah.Radiocarbon dating places this culture just before the end of the Pleistocene, in the period 12,500 to 9,500 BCE.
The period is commonly split into two subperiods: Early Natufian (12,500–10,800 BCE) and Late Natufian (10,800–9500 BCE).
The Late Natufian most likely occurred in tandem with the Younger Dryas (10,800 to 9500 BCE).
In the Levant, there are more than a hundred kinds of cereals, fruits, nuts and other edible parts of plants, and the flora of the Levant during the Natufian period was not the dry, barren, and thorny landscape of today, but parkland and woodland.