Prehistoric Men

The animal bones of the Natufian layers show beasts of a “modern” type, but with some differences from those of present-day Palestine. The bones of the gazelle far outnumber those of the deer; since gazelles like a much drier climate than deer, Palestine must then have had much the same climate that it has today. Some of the animal bones were those of large or dangerous beasts: the hyena, the bear, the wild boar, and the leopard. But the Natufian people may have had the help of a large domesticated dog. If our guess at a date for the Natufian is right (about 7750 B.C.), this is an earlier dog than was that in the Maglemosian of northern Europe. More recently, it has been reported that a domesticated goat is also part of the Natufian finds.

The study of the human bones from the Natufian burials is not yet complete. Until Professor McCown’s study becomes available, we may note Professor Coon’s assessment that these people were of a “basically Mediterranean type.”

THE KARIM SHAHIR ASSEMBLAGE

Karim Shahir differs from the Natufian sites in that it shows traces of a temporary open site or encampment. It lies on the top of a bluff in the Kurdish hill-country of northeastern Iraq. It was dug by Dr. Bruce Howe of the expedition I directed in 1950–51 for the Oriental Institute and the American Schools of Oriental Research. In 1954–55, our expedition located another site, M’lefaat, with general resemblance to Karim Shahir, but about a hundred miles north of it. In 1956, Dr. Ralph Solecki located still another Karim Shahir type of site called Zawi Chemi Shanidar. The Zawi Chemi site has a radiocarbon date of 8900 ± 300 B.C.

Karim Shahir has evidence of only one very shallow level of occupation. It was probably not lived on very long, although the people who lived on it spread out over about three acres of area. In spots, the single layer yielded great numbers of fist-sized cracked pieces of limestone, which had been carried up from the bed of a stream at the bottom of the bluff. We think these cracked stones had something to do with a kind of architecture, but we were unable to find positive traces of hut plans. At M’lefaat and Zawi Chemi, there were traces of rounded hut plans.

As in the Natufian, the great bulk of small objects of the Karim Shahir assemblage was in chipped flint. A large proportion of the flint tools were microlithic bladelets and geometric forms. The flint sickle blade was almost non-existent, being far scarcer than in the Natufian. The people of Karim Shahir did a modest amount of work in the grinding of stone; there were milling stone fragments of both the mortar and the quern type, and stone hoes or axes with polished bits. Beads, pendants, rings, and bracelets were made of finer quality stone. We found a few simple points and needles of bone, and even two rather formless unbaked clay figurines which seemed to be of animal form.

Karim Shahir did not yield direct evidence of the kind of vegetable food its people ate. The animal bones showed a considerable increase in the proportion of the bones of the species capable of domestication—sheep, goat, cattle, horse, dog—as compared with animal bones from the earlier cave sites of the area, which have a high proportion of bones of wild forms like deer and gazelle. But we do not know that any of the Karim Shahir animals were actually domesticated. Some of them may have been, in an “incipient” way, but we have no means at the moment that will tell us from the bones alone.

WERE THE NATUFIAN AND KARIM SHAHIR PEOPLES FOOD-PRODUCERS?

It is clear that a great part of the food of the Natufian people must have been hunted or collected. Shells of land, fresh-water, and sea animals occur in their cave layers. The same is true as regards Karim Shahir, save for sea shells. But on the other hand, we have the sickles, the milling stones, the possible Natufian dog, and the goat, and the general animal situation at Karim Shahir to hint at an incipient approach to food-production. At Karim Shahir, there was the tendency to settle down out in the open; this is echoed by the new reports of open air Natufian sites. The large number of cracked stones certainly indicates that it was worth the peoples’ while to have some kind of structure, even if the site as a whole was short-lived.

It is a part of my hunch that these things all point toward food-production—that the hints we seek are there. But in the sense that the peoples of the era of the primary village-farming community, which we shall look at next, are fully food-producing, the Natufian and Karim Shahir folk had not yet arrived. I think they were part of a general build-up to full scale food-production. They were possibly controlling a few animals of several kinds and perhaps one or two plants, without realizing the full possibilities of this “control” as a new way of life.

This is why I think of the Karim Shahir and Natufian folk as being at a level, or in an era, of incipient cultivation and domestication. But we shall have to do a great deal more excavation in this range of time before we’ll get the kind of positive information we need.

SUMMARY

I am sorry that this chapter has had to be so much more about ideas than about the archeological traces of prehistoric men themselves. But the antiquities of the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication will not be spectacular, even when we do have them excavated in quantity. Few museums will be interested in these antiquities for exhibition purposes. The charred bits or impressions of plants, the fragments of animal bone and shell, and the varied clues to climate and environment will be as important as the artifacts themselves. It will be the ideas to which these traces lead us that will be important. I am sure that this unspectacular material—when we have much more of it, and learn how to understand what it says—will lead us to how and why answers about the first great change in human history.

We know the earliest village-farming communities appeared in western Asia, in a nuclear area. We do not yet know why the Near Eastern experiment came first, or why it didn’t happen earlier in some other nuclear area. Apparently, the level of culture and the promise of the natural environment were ready first in western Asia. The next sites we look at will show a simple but effective food-production already in existence. Without effective food-production and the settled village-farming communities, civilization never could have followed. How effective food-production came into being by the end of the incipient era, is, I believe, one of the most fascinating questions any archeologist could face.

It now seems probable—from possibly two of the Palestinian sites with varieties of the Natufian (Jericho and Nahal Oren)—that there were one or more local Palestinian developments out of the Natufian into later times. In the same way, what followed after the Karim Shahir type of assemblage in northeastern Iraq was in some ways a reflection of beginnings made at Karim Shahir and Zawi Chemi.