Word: natufian
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...common narrative of mankind's development generally starts with humans planting crops and settling down in one place to reap what they sow, founding villages that would form the building blocks of human civilization. But further study of the Natufian culture and other parallel societies, such as those living by China's Yellow River, is complicating that belief. Agriculture was not established in the Levant when the Natufians lived there, but they still erected rudimentary structures to inhabit. Traces in the soil of the remains of mice and sparrows - animals that exist most commonly in places of human settlement - point...
...grave is thought to belong to the Natufian culture, a nomadic society which existed along the eastern Mediterranean roughly between 11,500 and 15,000 years ago. Located near other burial sites, the woman's body was distinctly encased in a limestone enclosure, a tomb sealed by a rock slab that Grosman's team managed to lift in 2006. The following two years were spent painstakingly analyzing the remains found within. Pieces of jewelry, ornamental seashells, or the odd tool have been found in other Natufian graves, but the careful arrangement of the woman's body - her back rested against...
...Grosman speculates that the elaborate ritual behind the shaman's burial probably helped bind people together at a time of great social transformation. The Natufian culture, she says, was "transitional," moving from the era of the nomadic life of hunter-gatherers into a more stable, sedentary mode. Their descendants were likely the inhabitants of West Asia's great kingdoms of antiquity. Somewhere beneath our vision of sceptered monarchs in their pillared palaces, it can be surmised, rests a hobbled woman upon a bed of tortoise shells...
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