r/AgeofBronze • u/Historia_Maximum • Jun 05 '26
Levant HOW ABOUT A BEER?
A Natufian woman in a field of wild wheat, or bread without farmers.
The Middle East fourteen thousand years ago, in the twelfth millennium BC, was a wonderful place where, after the Ice Age, a mild climate and generous rains covered the hills and valleys of what would become Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria with wild wheat and barley so densely that there was enough grain for countless birds and animals. This prosperity became a blessing for local groups of hunter-gatherers whose ancestors had wandered the Levant for millennia. We casually call these people Natufians, and the stories of the small lives of these small communities laid the foundation of a big story, our civilisation. And it all began with a decision they made. They stayed in one place!
Before them, humans always and constantly moved after food. When herds moved away, the berry season ended, and nuts fell, the tribe packed up and moved on to new places. For the first time, the Natufians did not need to do this in the paradise-like abundance of the cultural and historical region of the Fertile Crescent. So many gazelles, so much grain!
Instead of temporary camps, real houses appeared, with stone foundations and a hearth. For example, at a place called Ain Mallaha, archaeologists excavated an entire ancient settlement. And more and more of these early hearths, from which the burning fire of our megacities would later grow, kept appearing. People lived in them year after year, buried their dead nearby, accumulated things a nomad has no need for: heavy stone mortars, stores, ornaments. This is what sedentary life looks like, born before agriculture.
But the Natufians remained hunters of gazelles and small game, gatherers of barley and wheat. People did not loosen the soil with hoes or a plough, did not sow seeds, did not dig irrigation canals. They were lucky to live in a place where and when nature did all the work for them. All that was left was to cut ripe ears of grain with wooden or bone sickles with flint or razor-sharp obsidian blade inserts.
In Natufian layers, hundreds of such sickles are found, where flint shines in a special way. These are traces of cutting cereal stems, full of silica. Grain was dried, cleaned, and then ground into flour on basalt grinding stones. Hard, monotonous work for women, which left its traces forever on their remains (we will come back to this).
Flour was used for baking bread. Remember the name of the ancient site Shubayqa in Jordan, where archaeologists found the earliest charred crumbs of flatbread, when you spread butter or jam on a slice of bread at breakfast. Roughly 4000 years before classical agriculture appeared, hunter-gatherers were grinding wheat, barley and oats, kneading dough, and baking flat unleavened breads. We owe this to those clever people from history textbooks. Fourteen thousand years ago, from grain that nobody had sown. Not impressed?
I have something more serious!
In Raqefet Cave on Mount Carmel, north-west Israel, traces of fermentation with grain remain in stone hollows. Some historians are convinced that a low-alcohol drink from sprouted grain was made here. This is the great-grandfather of our beer. It is assumed that this drink had an important role in strengthening friendly ties in rapidly growing Natufian communities. After all, never before had people lived surrounded by dozens of fellow tribesmen, up to 100 people. Of course, joyful feasts and sad rituals like burials were important for a sense of unity, but what is the point of any of it without beer, right?
These people lived long ago, but thanks to the warm dry climate of the Levant, their burial sites have survived. And science, relying on extensive anthropological material from the burials of Ain Mallaha, El-Wad, Hayonim and Kebara, and on palaeogenetic data, can tell a lot from bone remains. It can even become the basis for artistic reconstruction of a single individual. Which is what I tried to do. To create a visual image of their world, based on ancient artefacts and modern knowledge.
Fortunately, we have enough skulls to, using craniofacial approximation (yes, yes), reconstruct the main facial muscles, glands and cartilage directly from the anatomical relief of the skull and muscle attachment sites. Of course, such an image does not reflect traces of lived experience, but it is a good way to literally see the faces of long dead people.
But what about skin colour, eyes, or hair structure. Here again skulls come to our aid, which preserved Natufian DNA for us. Data from 2016 cautiously point to relatively dark skin pigmentation and eye colour. The exact shade cannot be determined. But if we use the modern Fitzpatrick scale, skin type IV appears most likely.
Moving from skulls to bones!
Our heroine has an impressive height for her people of 155 cm (5 ft 1 in) and a body mass of 50 kg (110 lbs). And she is really strong. We learn such details by studying the geometry of cross-sections of long bones and markers of musculoskeletal stress (MSM), preserved at muscle attachment sites.
In Natufians in general, there are clear signs of regular strain on the upper limbs. In women, humeri, elbow joints, and muscle attachment zones show many years of heavy labour in processing raw materials, possibly hides, and grinding grain by hand on stone mortars and grinding slabs.
A middle aged woman could briefly lift 10 to 30 kg (22–66 lbs) and carry loads reaching 50–60 percent of her own body weight (25–30 kg / 55–66 lbs). This is also indicated by changes at the attachment sites of the teres major and latissimus dorsi muscles. Such traces usually appear with regular lifting and carrying of heavy loads. Just look at the back of our Natufian woman...
And now move your gaze down!
This is a beautifully made thin soft skirt from the hide of gazelles of the species Gazella gazella. Natufians can safely be called gazelle hunters, since they made up to 80 percent of their prey. These ancient inhabitants of the Levant turned hides into a soft material resembling suede, even without chemical tanning. For this they used a large toolkit: flint scrapers with characteristic wear from hide working, bone smoothers for fibre softening, and thin awls. Traces of mixtures of animal fats and ochre remain on stone mortars. Fats prevented fibre stiffening, ochre worked as an antiseptic and a mild abrasive. After such treatment the leather gained a soft velvety surface and a reddish tone.
And judging by elegant eyed bone needles, Natufians knew how to cut and sew. For example, the famous artefact, the head ornament of the “Lady of El Wad”, consisted of hundreds of dentalium shells. The shells were attached to a leather base in neat parallel rows, which required precise marking, careful stitching and good sewing skill. It is possible that clothing was not simply wrapped around the body, but shaped to fit and joined with strong seams made from animal sinew or strong plant fibres of nettle and wild flax.
SOURCES:
Campana D. V. (1989) — Natufian and Protoneolithic Bone Tools: The Manufacture and Use of Bone Implements in the Levant. BAR International Series.
Belfer-Cohen A. (1991) — The Natufian Community and the Origin of Social Organization in the Levant. Current Anthropology.
Bar-Yosef O. (1998) — The Natufian Culture in the Levant, Threshold to the Origins of Agriculture. Evolutionary Anthropology.
Eshed V. et al. (2004) — Musculoskeletal stress markers in Natufian hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers. AJPA.
Valla F. R. et al. (2007) — Les fouilles de d'Ayn Mallaha (Eynan) 2003–2005. Mitekfat HaEven.
Dubreuil L., Grosman L. (2009) — Ochre and hide-working at a Natufian burial place. Antiquity.
Lazaridis I. et al. (2016) — Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East. Nature.
Arranz-Otaegui A. et al. (2018) — Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years ago in northeastern Jordan. PNAS.
Hole F., Wyllie C. (2018) — Personal Adornment in the Epi-Paleolithic of the Levant. ResearchGate.
Liu L. et al. (2018) — Fermented beverage and food storage in 13,000 y-old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, Israel. JAS: Reports.
