Chacha Jasari Amani Who occupied the land that is occupied by Palestinians and Jews today first?
How great to find a question on this topic that I am pleased to be able to give a non-controversial answer to.
The land in question is the site of one of the candidates for ‘first city in human existence’, or at least, ‘oldest continuously inhabited urban area’ (oh dear, here I was trying to avoid controversy: yes, there are other sites that may have a claim to being older): Jericho, in the West Bank today. The culture of the earliest people at Jericho is often identified with the people called the ‘Natufians’. They are the earliest ones who can actually be named and identified with permanent settlements, and so I offer them as the ones who occupied it ‘first’ (although — more controversy — the Levant is a very important corridor for human migration throughout all of pre-history, even before the emergence of our current species, and there is plenty of archaeological evidence for members of our genus being in that area for most of the last two million years; I am picking the Natufians because theirs is the time when we first start to see permanent settlements, like at Jericho).
Here is where they lived, according to Wikipedia:
(Source: the Wikipedia article linked below)
The Natufian culture predates the dawn of what is often called the Neolithic Revolution: the invention of agriculture and domestication. The Natufians themselves — often dated to have first emerged around 15,000 years ago — were basically hunter-gatherers for most of their existence, but they did use the wild grains they collected in ways that would foreshadow later agriculturalists. For instance, our earliest evidence for things like breadmaking and beer brewing come from Natufian sites.
Jericho — Tell es-Sultan — seems to have emerged as a sort of camping ground initially for these people that eventually became a permanent settlement due to a nearby spring, with evidence going back to around 12,000 years ago (c10,000 BC). What exactly happened next is, obviously, a bit difficult to tell; some people think that climate change may have been a part of it (the Levant in the Natufian days was mostly a woodland rather than the arid place it is today), but it is possible that it was all just a little more organic with an enterprising clever clogs noticing certain grasses growing around the site of a latrine, but basically, towards the end of the Natufian period, agriculture began to develop: the artificial selection of particular grasses to cultivate, leading eventually to a shift in lifestyle from the fairly mobile hunter-gatherers to one that is more settled, in order to tend those grasses. This shift is dated very roughly to around 10,000 years ago, what we call the ‘Holocene Epoch’; the hunter-gatherer Natufian culture begins to be succeeded by an increasingly agricultural people with the much less snappy name ‘Pre-Pottery Neolithic A’ (or ‘PPNA’ to their friends) around 8500 BC.
So wherever you are, break your pita this morning or raise your ale tonight to the memory of the Natufians, the intrepid pre-ancient Levantines who invented bread and beer, making us bloated and happy ever since.
In their memory, let’s remark on the truly astonishing history of humanity in the Levantine, and taking inspiration from it, let’s pray for peace and the safety of all Israelis and Palestinians, and for political, rather than violent, resolution to the current conflict.
Some further reading:
