The beginnings of sedentary lifeways
Meanwhile, climate change trapped other foraging peoples in environments where they had to develop new ways of life. Some of these environments offered new kinds of abundance. Here were broad-leaved forests, rich in acorns (which make nutritious food for any humans who have enough time to fine-grind them), and lakes and rivers full of aquatic life.
New World prairies held apparently inexhaustible stocks of bison (though the largest bison species was rapidly hunted to extinction or perished in challenging climatic conditions). Between the unstable periods of climate change around 12,000 years ago, foragers even colonized dense, tropical forests in southeast Asia and in the New World at Pedra Pintada in Brazil where the Amazon river now flows.[408] This is a region where foragers today have to struggle to find foods they can digest, but it seems to have been more environmentally diverse towards the end of the Ice Age.Under some conditions, people can settle in one place without the trouble of farming. Archaeological evidence from the post-Ice-Age Middle East shows this. A frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran, eastern Turkey, and Iraq. The forests were full of acorns, pistachios, and almonds, which gatherers ground into flour and paste. The grasslands bred vast quantities of wild grass with edible seeds. These foods could all be
warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at different times. Dense herds of gazelle in the grasslands provided more nutrition for hunters to bring home. Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to find it.
By about 14,000 to 15,000 years ago, permanent settlements, known as Natufian from an example at Natuf in what is now Israel, arose across much of the region: clusters of dwellings with stone walls, or those made of wood on stone foundations, or cut from soft stone and roofed with reeds.
The foragers who lived in these communities kept to themselves. Villages had distinctive identities and habits, which almost amounted to badges of identity. Some favoured gazelle toe bones for jewellery; some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs. The people married within their own communities, judging from the evidence of inherited physical characteristics. For example, in some villages, people were relatively short, while in others, they had distinctive dental patterns. These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs, which suggests that they were territorial - that they had a sense of possession that tillers would recognize.[409]In sum, the lives of pre-agricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early farmers who succeeded them that when archaeologists first found the foragers' villages in the 1930s, they assumed the inhabitants were farmers and some recent scholarship has returned to something like the same notion.[410] Yet - though their means of life are the subject of debate - on the present balance of evidence the Natufians do not seem to have been farmers in the generally accepted sense of the term: they gathered food, rather than producing it themselves. Their settlements lasted only as long as the stands of wild grasses they harvested. But while their food stocks endured the settled foragers were actually better off than farmers. Their remains, on the whole, show better health and nourishment than the farming peoples who followed later in the same region. A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth, but - unlike the farmers - they have none of the streaked tooth-enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages.
Similar evidence of pre-agricultural settlements in overlapping periods exists in other places. The Jomon people of central Honshu Island in Japan lived in permanent villages 13,000 years ago, feeding themselves by fishing and gathering acorns and chestnuts.
They made pots for display, in elaborate shapes, modelled on flames and serpents and lacquered them with tree sap. Their potters were, in a sense, magicians, transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritual.[411] In the Egyptian Sahara, at Nabta Playa, about forty plant species, including sorghum, a type of cereal grass, grew alongside hearths and pit ovens, evidence of settled life from about 10,000 years ago. In other parts of central Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cooler climate than now, foragers found sorghum and millet. At Gobekli Tepe, a hilltop site in southeast Turkey, contemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat hewed seven-ton pillars from limestone. They re-erected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes, boar, gazelles, cranes, and symbols that look suspiciously like writing.[412]What was life like in these earliest settlements? Small, permanent houses suggest that nuclear families - parents and children - predominated, though some sites clearly have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts. As for who did the work, the most stunning finding of recent archaeology in the Middle East suggests that work was probably shared between the sexes.[413] The way skeletons are muscled suggests that women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more grinding) than men, and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women. But both sexes did both activities. Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they had evolved to look differently. As food production replaced hunting and gathering, war and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society. The convergence between the physical features of men and women seems still to be in progress today. Indeed, it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and more tasks, and the need for heavily muscled or big-framed bodies diminishes along with physically demanding jobs in much of the world.