It is difficult even for an experienced comparative zoologist to tell which are the bones of domesticated animals and which are those of their wild cousins. This is especially so because the animal bones the archeologists find are usually fragmentary. Furthermore, we do not have a sort of library collection of the skeletons of the animals or an herbarium of the plants of those times, against which the traces which the archeologists find may be checked. We are only beginning to get such collections for the modern wild forms of animals and plants from some of our nuclear areas. In the nuclear area in the Near East, some of the wild animals, at least, have already become extinct. There are no longer wild cattle or wild horses in western Asia. We know they were there from the finds we’ve made in caves of late Ice Age times, and from some slightly later sites.
SITES WITH ANTIQUITIES OF THE INCIPIENT ERA
So far, we know only a very few sites which would suit my notion of the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication. I am closing this chapter with descriptions of two of the best Near Eastern examples I know of. You may not be satisfied that what I am able to describe makes a full-bodied era of development at all. Remember, however, that I’ve told you I’m largely playing a kind of a hunch, and also that the archeological materials of this era will always be extremely difficult to interpret. At the beginning of any new way of life, there will be a great tendency for people to make-do, at first, with tools and habits they are already used to. I would suspect that a great deal of this making-do went on almost to the end of this era.
THE NATUFIAN, AN ASSEMBLAGE OF THE INCIPIENT ERA
The assemblage called the Natufian comes from the upper layers of a number of caves in Palestine. Traces of its flint industry have also turned up in Syria and Lebanon. We don’t know just how old it is. I guess that it probably falls within five hundred years either way of about 5000 B.C.
Until recently, the people who produced the Natufian assemblage were thought to have been only cave dwellers, but now at least three open air Natufian sites have been briefly described. In their best-known dwelling place, on Mount Carmel, the Natufian folk lived in the open mouth of a large rock-shelter and on the terrace in front of it. On the terrace, they had set at least two short curving lines of stones; but these were hardly architecture; they seem more like benches or perhaps the low walls of open pens. There were also one or two small clusters of stones laid like paving, and a ring of stones around a hearth or fireplace. One very round and regular basin-shaped depression had been cut into the rocky floor of the terrace, and there were other less regular basin-like depressions. In the newly reported open air sites, there seem to have been huts with rounded corners.
Most of the finds in the Natufian layer of the Mount Carmel cave were flints. About 80 per cent of these flint tools were microliths made by the regular working of tiny blades into various tools, some having geometric forms. The larger flint tools included backed blades, burins, scrapers, a few arrow points, some larger hacking or picking tools, and one special type. This last was the sickle blade.
We know a sickle blade of flint when we see one, because of a strange polish or sheen which seems to develop on the cutting edge when the blade has been used to cut grasses or grain, or—perhaps—reeds. In the Natufian, we have even found the straight bone handles in which a number of flint sickle blades were set in a line.
There was a small industry in ground or pecked stone (that is, abraded not chipped) in the Natufian. This included some pestle and mortar fragments. The mortars are said to have a deep and narrow hole, and some of the pestles show traces of red ochre. We are not sure that these mortars and pestles were also used for grinding food. In addition, there were one or two bits of carving in stone.