The Natufian culture in the Levant, threshold to the origins of agriculture

The aim of this paper is to provide the reader with an updated description of the archeological evidence for the origins of agriculture in the Near East. Specifically, I will address the question of why the emergence of farming communities in the Near East was an inevitable outcome of a series of social and economic circumstances that caused the Natufian culture to be considered the threshold for this major evolutionary change.1–4 The importance of such an understanding has global implications. Currently, updated archeological information points to two other centers of early cultivation, central Mexico and the middle Yangtze River in China, that led to the emergence of complex civilizations.4 However, the best‐recorded sequence from foraging to farming is found in the Near East. Its presence warns against the approach of viewing all three evolutionary sequences as identical in terms of primary conditions, economic and social motivations and activities, and the resulting cultural, social, and ideological changes. © 1998 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

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