Recent excavations at Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) WF16 in southern Jordan have revealed remarkable evidence of architectural developments in the early Neolithic. This sheds light on both special purpose structures and "domestic" settlement, allowing fresh insights into the development of increasingly sedentary communities and the social systems they supported. The development of sedentary communities is a central part of the Neolithic process in Southwest Asia. Architecture and ideas of homes and households have been important to the debate, although there has also been considerable discussion on the role of communal buildings and the organization of early sedentarizing communities since the discovery of the tower at Jericho. Recently, the focus has been on either northern Levantine PPNA sites, such as Jerf el Ahmar, or the emergence of ritual buildings in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B of the southern Levant. Much of the debate revolves around a division between what is interpreted as domestic space, contrasted with "special purpose" buildings. Our recent evidence allows a fresh examination of the nature of early Neolithic communities.forager-farmer transition | Near East T he Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) is the earliest Neolithic in Southwest Asia (circa 11,600 to 10,200 y ago) situated between hunting and gathering and sedentary farming societies. It is generally considered as the key period in the shift to management and production of resources, wherein increasingly sedentary communities start to produce food to extend the period of occupation at a site, with one of the main economic developments in the PPNA being the cultivation of wild cereals. Social changes are as significant as economic ones, enabling communities to both increase in size and live together for longer periods, and, arguably, it is these social changes that drive the economic developments. Architecture is an important facet of the early Neolithic, providing evidence for an increasingly sedentary lifestyle; changing social structures; and, in the growth of communities, a motive for the development of food production.Three basic assumptions tend to be made regarding PPNA settlements: (i) that the presence of stone or mud architecture indicates sedentism; (ii) that most buildings are domestic and can be described as houses forming small permanent villages; and (iii) that any buildings not fitting this pattern are "special," with some communal function, frequently assumed to be ritual as opposed to a domestic norm, including the tower at Jericho (1), monumental stone-pillared structures at Göbekli Tepe (2), and communal buildings at Jerf el Ahmar and Mureybet (3). On the basis of our recent discoveries at WF16, we argue that these normative assumptions must be questioned. Can we really identify basic domestic structures in these early settlements, and do they exist in opposition to the nondomestic? This has profound implications for how we understand PPNA social organization.Strong arguments have been made that the PPNA is part of a long, sl...

The Aceramic Neolithic (∼9600 to 7000 cal BC) period in the Zagros Mountains, western Iran, provides some of the earliest archaeological evidence of goat (Capra hircus) management and husbandry by circa 8200 cal BC, with detectable morphological change appearing ∼1,000 y later. To examine the genomic imprint of initial management and its implications for the goat domestication process, we analyzed 14 novel nuclear genomes (mean coverage 1.13X) and 32 mitochondrial (mtDNA) genomes (mean coverage 143X) from two such sites, Ganj Dareh and Tepe Abdul Hosein. These genomes show two distinct clusters: those with domestic affinity and a minority group with stronger wild affinity, indicating that managed goats were genetically distinct from wild goats at this early horizon. This genetic duality, the presence of long runs of homozygosity, shared ancestry with later Neolithic populations, a sex bias in archaeozoological remains, and demographic profiles from across all layers of Ganj Dareh support management of genetically domestic goat by circa 8200 cal BC, and represent the oldest to-this-date reported livestock genomes. In these sites a combination of high autosomal and mtDNA diversity, contrasting limited Y chromosomal lineage diversity, an absence of reported selection signatures for pigmentation, and the wild morphology of bone remains illustrates domestication as an extended process lacking a strong initial bottleneck, beginning with spatial control, demographic manipulation via biased male culling, captive breeding, and subsequently phenotypic and genomic selection.

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This paper discusses the Late Natufian avifaunal remains from Shubayqa 1, a Late Epipalaeolithic site situated in north‐east Jordan. The site has produced an exceptionally large and well‐preserved assemblage of bird bones recovered from a substantial midden deposit, and from the analysis of this material, we argue that there is evidence for en masse hunting of seasonally migrating waterfowl during the occupation of the site. The abundance of waterfowl and the hunting strategies employed to capture this prey must have resulted in a plentiful supply of meat, enabling the choicest parts of the birds to be quickly removed from the rest of the carcass. The tibiotarsus bones were also frequently taken back to the habitation site for use as a raw material, possibly for bead manufacture. Extensive hunting of the birds was not a result of resource pressure as often argued; instead, people chose to take advantage of a particularly abundant prey population during the winter months. This evidence casts a critical light on the suggestion that population growth and environmental change forced late Pleistocene hunter‐gatherers in the Levant to expand their subsistence base to include lower‐ranked prey species. Our data also have implications for the palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of the landscape. The presence of a few bones of birds other than waterfowl suggests these species had minimal importance to the diet of the inhabitants and bones from diurnal raptors may have been collected to be used in decorative items or as tools rather than reflecting the hunting of these species for food. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Late Epipalaeolithic Natufian (~14,600 − 11,500 cal BP) is a key period in the prehistory of southwest Asia. Often described as a complex hunting and gathering society with increased sedentism, intensive plant exploitation and associated with an increase in artistic and symbolic material culture, it is positioned between the earlier Upper- and Epi-Palaeolithic and the early Neolithic, when plant cultivation and subsequently animal domestication began. The Natufian has thus often been seen as a necessary pre-adaptation for the emergence of Neolithic economies in southwest Asia. Previous work has pointed to the Mediterranean woodland zone of the southern Levant as the ‘core zone’ of the Early Natufian. Here we present a new sequence of 27 AMS radiocarbon dates from the Natufian site Shubayqa 1 in northeast Jordan. The results suggest that the site was occupied intermittently between ~14,600 − 12,000 cal BP. The dates indicate the Natufian emerged just as early in eastern Jordan as it did in the Mediterranean woodland zone. This suggests that the origins and development of the Natufian were not tied to the ecological conditions of the Mediterranean woodlands, and that the evolution of this hunting and gathering society was more complex and heterogeneous than previously thought.