Animals as Domesticates: A World View through History

2. Settlement and Domestication in Eurasia

19 2 Settlement and Domestication in Eurasia As the ice sheets melted in northern Europe and Asia, the climate of the Mediterranean region and western Asia became warmer and wetter, and the nomadic people, like those in the north, flourished by hunting the local wildlife and gathering the abundant edible plants and wild cereals. The earliest period after the end of the Ice Age in this region is known as the Epipalaeolithic, and like the Mesolithic people of Europe, the hunters used arrows tipped with small sharp flakes, or microliths. The Epipalaeolithic has a different terminology in different regions of western Asia. In the Levant it is called the Kebaran, named after the type site of Kebara Cave, south of Haifa, dated from around 14,000 to 12,000 years ago. The Kebaran period was a time of high productivity for humans, animals, and plants. Huge herds of gazelles must have inhabited the grasslands, and their bones predominate in the faunal assemblages from all the sites.1 The later Kebaran period, known as the Geometric Kebaran after the shape of the microliths, overlapped with the period, also Mesolithic, that is known in the Levant as the Natufian. Kebaran sites, followed by the Natufian, are of the greatest importance for revealing the earliest evidence of communities living a settled existence with the beginnings of plant cultivation. It is here that can be seen, as James Mellaart wrote in his now classic book, The Neolithic in the Near East, the dimly emerging picture of an increasing awareness of the potentialities of the environment, the first steps towards food conservation through herding, wild grain collecting and its preparation as food and a trend, however limited, to sedentary life. Such features did not appear everywhere at the same time, they were as yet isolated and experimental, yet they constituted the embryo stage of plant and animal domestication which was ultimately to carry man from a hunting existence to that of the farmer and trader.2 Mellaart was correct in asserting that the Natufian was the crucial period for the beginnings of agriculture. However, much archaeological discovery has continued at the sites since Mellaart’s book was written in 1975, and there has been much more discussion about what prompted the people to leave their way of life as nomadic hunters and settle down in semipermanent villages, where finds of sickle blades are a witness to the harvesting of wild cereals.3 Most of the meat for the communities was still obtained from hunting gazelles, but the faunal remains from Natufian sites show a greater diversity of species than at earlier sites, with birds, tortoises, snakes, and mollusks being represented. 20| Chapter 2 The Late Natufian, dated to 10800–9500 bce, occurred during the climatic period known as the Younger Dryas when the warm and wet woodland areas became colder and drier and the carrying capacity of the land was reduced. This has tempted archaeologists to propose the hypothesis that the Natufians, whose population numbers had greatly increased in the earlier period, were driven to live a semisedentary existence and expand their food resources by a shortage of wild animals to hunt. Whatever prompted the Natufian people to change their way of life, like the Mesolithic people of Star Carr in England and Bedburg in Belgium, they owned “dogs” whose skeletal remains are distinctly different from those of wolves. The best known of these is the skeleton of a puppy from the site of Ein Mallaha.4 The site, dated to 9600 bce, is near Huleh Lake in the upper Jordan Valley. Its inhabitants were hunter-gatherers who, like other Natufians, were on the verge of becoming agriculturalists. They lived in round stone dwellings, used stone pestles and mortars for grinding cereals, and buried their dead in stone-covered tombs. In one of these tombs at the entrance of a dwelling, the skeleton of an elderly human was found together with the skeleton of a puppy of between four and five months of age. The human skeleton lay on its right side, in a flexed position, with a hand on the thorax of the puppy. The canid skeleton is too large to be a jackal and was either a tamed wolf or a dog. It is more difficult in sites of this region than in Europe to distinguish between the skeletal remains of juvenile wolf and dog because the local Arabian wolf, Canis lupus arabs, is a very small subspecies, but there can be no...