All language subtitles for Stories From the Stone Age - 1 - Daily Bread

It's the end of the last ice age.

Our ancestors have survived this
freezing desolation for 25 ,000 years.

They are hunter -gatherers.

They travel light, their children with
them.

one meal away from starvation.

They are never able to settle down.

But these nomads are about to change the
world.

Their Stone Age revolution will make our
civilization possible.

They will set humanity on the long
journey to the modern world.

Around 15 ,000 years ago, the climate
began to change.

The glaciers melted, and with water, the
world came back to life.

One of the best places for humans to
live now was an area of the Middle East

call the Fertile Crescent, from Israel
to Iraq.

The hills were dotted with trees, which
spread quickly as the weather improved.

The open woodlands were like a garden,
supporting a new range of edible plants.

Animals flourished on the uplands and
fertile plains.

It was a hunter -gatherer's paradise.

It was here that travelling bands found
something completely new, which would

change humanity forever.

They discovered a huge family of plants.

The grasses.

It was a vast supply of grain.

was the spark which would make human
progress possible.

The evidence is scattered in valleys
across the Fertile Crescent.

These people left no recorded language
or stories.

All the archaeologists can do is dig.

In the 1920s, the first great woman
archaeologist, Dorothy Garrard, carried

excavations around Mount Carmel in
Israel.

She was looking in caves she thought had
been used 50 ,000 years earlier.

Instead, she unearthed the body of a man
buried around 12 ,000 years ago.

He was curled up, wearing a beautifully
crafted headband decorated with pipe

-like seashell.

It was so distinctive.

Garrett believed she had discovered a
new people.

She named them the Natufians.

As she kept digging, she found

something researchers had never seen
before.

It was a tool with a bone handle.

It held a line of sharp flint blades.

They were coated with a shiny residue,
traces of a wild grass, an

ancient form of wheat.

It was a fickle, a tool designed
especially for cutting grass.

So Dorothy Garrett knew the Natufians
were collecting the new grass foods in

large quantities.

At the same time each year, these
ancient people would have found the

grass in huge areas.

Many of them were not edible, but they
managed to select all the useful

Now they had barley and wheat.

But they were travelers working together
in small family groups.

They had to carry everything they
harvested.

This burden would ultimately change
their way of life.

Today, the land of the Natufians is
drier and hotter.

The past is waiting to be discovered
just beneath a forbidding surface.

Here, at Wadi Hama, in northern Jordan,
the Natufians left minute traces of

their lives.

archaeologist Philip Edwards has found
evidence that these nomads had

they needed in one place.

They're well placed here. They're on
water and they're positioned between the

lowlands of the Jordan Valley and the
uplands of the Mediterranean hills

In fact, the Jordan Valley, when the
Tufian people were here, was filled

A lake, Lake Lausanne, which extended
right up and right past the scene here.

And looking over that, we would see, if
it was a clearer day, Mount Carmel

peeping out on the coast, the site where
the Natufian was discovered originally

by Dorothy Garrard.

Archaeologists estimate there were no
more than a thousand families living in

the whole of Israel and Jordan at the
time.

There was enough grain to feed them
well.

And it was all growing wild.

Now archaeologists have experimented in
harvesting wild cereals in their natural

area in the Middle East. And what they
found is that One person harvesting for

period of about three weeks can produce
enough food to feed a family of four for

a whole year.

These ancient grasses are the
forerunners of modern crops.

The grains discovered by the Natufians
still feed more than half the world's

population today.

Of all the things they ate, grain was
unique in one vital way.

It did not decay.

Keep it dry and it lasts for decades.

For the first time, they had food they
could rely on for long periods of time.

Now, they needed to store their grain.

There was a reason to stay in one place.

This was the first time in the Middle
East we know people built shelters to

from year to year.

And they remained here from generation
to generation down the centuries.

They chose their sites carefully.

Many had low stone walls.

Their remains can be found all through
the region.

The Natufians, in time of plenty,
established their villages, or small

villages, hamlets, where they had a
series of pit houses.

which required some energy expenditure.

They had to dig into the ground, build
walls that sometimes up to one meter

high, and then create some sort of a
cover with brush.

They were not large, but the community
itself was not large, and estimated to

between 25 to 50 people.

Inside, each hut had its own hearth.

where food was cooked on hot stones.

On the floor, they left the fragments
that today provide clues to their daily

life.

Pieces of flint.

Shavings of bone.

Burnt seeds stayed in the ashes of the
fire.

They threw the remains of their food on
the ground.

To archaeologists, this refuse is a mine
of information.

It shows just what wild game they were
able to catch.

Their hunting expeditions were still
vital to their diet.

They are very eclectic foragers and
hunters.

Everything virtually that ran, swam,
crawled or flew was eaten.

So we've got gazelle, which was the
mainstay generally of the Natufian

repertoire. We've got aurochs or extinct
wild cattle, goats.

We have wolf, fox, crab, tortoise.

We've got hare, cat and then a whole
range of birds.

While the Natufians would hunt anything,

They were adept at catching large
animals out on the range.

They probably used the bowler, with
three stones connected by cords and

together.

Or the slingshot.

Both were difficult to aim and throw
accurately.

They moved to the rhythm of the seasons.

and roamed for weeks at a time.

Despite a hard life, they seem to have
been physically fit.

They lived well. Their teeth were good.
They were often ground down a lot, and

that was because of the amount of basalt
ground, stone ground, flour and other

foods they were probably eating.

They tended to have, like a lot of
hunter -gatherers, a very physical

with signs of healed fractures, and this
shows up in their skeleton.

Hunting was a dangerous way of life.

They were vulnerable to injury, and
their weapons were fragile.

Their campsites show they worked
constantly on repairs and making new

Like all Stone Age people, they relied
on flint.

By splintering different stones in the
right way, they created an amazing range

of specialised blades and axes.

They had their own toolkits, which were
precious and vital for survival.

We were digging out these houses in
square metres and every so often we'd

across an extraordinary set of tools
just stacked up where they were, left 12

,000 years ago.

And it was so clustered, it looked as if
it had been in some kind of bag, which

had been placed down there and never
picked up again.

In the bag were seven smooth, round
river stones, almost certainly for use

a slingshot.

A piece of flint.

And struck from it, a group of small
spear blades.

called lunuts.

Some gazelle toe bones, raw materials
for more tools and artworks.

And a sickle, its handle made from
antlerhorn, fitted with rose -coloured

Here, the Natufian hunter takes
technology one step further.

This sickle's double -bladed.

for added efficiency.

It was all of the things that
characterised the Natufian way of

gathering. The sickle for harvesting,
the spearheads for hunting, the

smooth stones, possibly sling stones,
and then their preoccupation with

ornaments made from the gazelle, the
gazelle toe bones which they made into

beads.

The Natufians had a unique feeling for
decoration.

They loved carving and carefully shaped
their mortars and pestles.

It's now that archaeologists find them
in numbers far greater than ever before.

They may have traded their carvings for
the hard mortar stone.

These have had to be made out of a
single large block of basalt.

You can see the shape, almost perfectly
circular, lovely bevelled

rims, beautiful footed stands and even

thicknesses of the vessels all the way
through.

There's been many hours of careful work
put into producing these things.

and doing so to, once again, a high
aesthetic standard that goes perhaps

the immediate needs of a piece of rock
to pound a pestle into to grind up

The most amazing thing about these
mortars is their sheer size.

They were far too heavy to carry around.

We know the Natufians left them year
after year at their own hearths.

They are beginning to settle down near
their own food supply.

These early varieties of grain did not
allow them to turn the flour into bread.

Instead, a coarse biscuit combines
different grains.

A kind of pancake was the ancestor of
today's flatbread.

Skilled processing meant their teeth
were not worn away by the coarse grain.

They seem to have been clever about
storage, although all the evidence has

decayed.

We know hollow gourds grew in the area
and they understood how to tan leather.

The stored food must have been a
treasure.

It was a chance to share and celebrate
and keep the clan together.

It meant they could plan ahead.

and rely on the future.

But stored grain was not enough to
guarantee survival.

The Natufians needed to combine their
grain with seasonal foods like berries

nuts.

They were instinctively creating a
balanced diet.

Fruit and vegetables with meat.

and starch.

Inadvertently, they were directing the
future evolution of plants, choosing the

best, the biggest, the sweetest to carry
home.

It was the seeds of these carefully
selected foods that ended up in the

pile.

The refuse was moist and organically
rich, rather like a garden bed.

The plants would sprout and cross
-pollinate to create a more useful

These were the first experimental
gardens.

The Natufians were on the move all the
time.

In many ways, They had the best of the
settled and the nomadic.

We know from hunter -gatherers still
living today in Africa and Australia

the lifestyle created leisure.

Particularly in the hot sun, the
community probably came together.

Archaeologists guess it was an intensely
shared world based on giving rather

than individual wealth.

We know nothing about their social
structure.

In modern hunter -gatherers, this is
often extremely complex, regulating

groups that relied on each other with
almost no privacy.

But we do know these bands met together
as part of a larger culture.

They traded or shared prized materials
which helped to maintain a network of

extended kin.

This trade kept the wider Natufian
culture together.

It enabled their tools to travel
throughout the region.

They were experimenting with the
beginnings of commerce.

What's more, they swapped ideas, new
tools, new decorations

and foods.

But these meetings between clans had an
even more fundamental purpose.

Biological survival demanded they bring
back new blood to the settlement.

With permanent buildings, the Natufian
world was changing.

Increasingly, they must have thought of
themselves as coming from this valley

and this cluster of huts.

Their rituals and beliefs are gone.

with hardly a trace of evidence.

But we know they had a ceremony which
linked the death of someone special to

their home.

They dug a hole in the floor under the
fireplace, and there they buried the

dead.

They made it a sacred place.

They brought in a huge river stone and
placed it in the grave on top of the

body.

The grieving family added the kind of
objects found in so many graves, the

poignant treasures of daily life.

These graves are found across the
Natufian world.

The dead are all less than 50 years old,
and they died of injuries.

Our young person...

had suffered a number of injuries in his
life, some of which he'd got over, some

of which he finally couldn't. And they
included this massive bone growth on the

middle of the tibia, or main lower leg
bone, which had come about because of a

huge tear in the muscle that attaches to
the foot.

And that would have left him with an
extremely painful leg injury.

But that healed.

and a bone growth grew around the tendon
attachment on the mid -lower leg, and

he was able to get over that.

He also suffered a number of fractures
to the skull, one which appears to have

healed, one which didn't, which is
probably what killed him.

And finally, when the young person was
buried, a large

rock was deliberately placed over the
chest, and the pit back felled.

With the dead buried under the
foundations, the huts took on a new

They repaired them regularly.

In these safe places, individual
possessions could be secure.

Here, people could make and keep
ornaments and other personal

They made beautiful necklaces of shell.

and carved teeth.

This stone carving is an animal with
long horns.

A small human figure made with a sense
of humour.

bone animal, blackened with age, is a
prancing gazelle.

The Natufian way of life continued for
two and a half thousand years.

Then suddenly, in less than ten years,
it all came to an end.

The glaciers returned to Europe.

trapping the Earth's fresh water in ice.

The rest of the world became colder and
drier.

Scientists call this short ice age the
Younger Dryad.

In the Middle East, there was a vast
drought.

A great famine spread over the land.

It was an environmental catastrophe.

In this period, the Younger Dryas, which
is cold and dry, the Natufians were

forced to make a change.

They were forced to make a change
because the environment changed and as a

result of the depletion of resources,
the number of animals decreased.

And the yields, the annual yields of the
wild fields decreased as well.

Under these circumstances, you have to
change.

The Natufians were forced to abandon
their settlements forever.

Clans splintered into small groups,
ranging desperately, nomadically, for

Many perished.

It might have been like a sustained
series of the worst droughts.

The wild plant foods that these people
relied upon just really weren't there

anymore and that it may have forced
people back into a more mobile way of

whereby they had to shift with the
resources and it seems to have broken

up this period or this phase of
formative villages in the Jordan Valley

flanks and across the Galilee and into
the Mount Carmel area.

Then the Natufians were offered one slim
chance of survival.

The drying Great Lake in Jordan exposed
a fertile plain.

It was here, on the shores of today's
Lake Galilee, that a few Natufian

attempted to survive.

Water, high in the hills, fed just a
handful of natural springs that kept

new land moist and fertile.

Now, the Natufians faced a profound
challenge.

They had abundant water.

But these oases were very different from
the rangelands and spaces they knew.

What happens now is pieced together from
the evidence of a number of sites in

the Jordan Valley.

It is a triumph of human adaptability.

They knew this could never be a natural
site for the huge grass colonies they

once depended on.

So they created their own miniature
controlled landscape.

They dug the ground.

They took their own precious food
stocks.

and sacrificed them for the future.

This simple act was the beginning of a
new way of life.

It would ultimately transform the face
of the earth.

They were the world's first farmers.

Late Natufian foragers had to adapt to
new conditions their ancestors didn't

recognize before, and they had two
options in a way.

One option was to move out, and the
other option was to change the

strategy, to change the way you make
your living.

It seems that the option to move out to
other places

did not take place or didn't take room
among the discussions within the

Natufians because you can imagine the
people sitting there and saying, moving

north would mean conflict, war with
other hunters -gatherers. Why don't we

it in a different way?

And I can easily imagine some of the old
females telling them, hey guys, the

best way is let's try and reseed our
field.

Let's try and cultivate our own plants
so we can stay in the same places

moving too far away.

The drought lasted for over a thousand
years.

But then, in less than a generation, the
ice age of the Younger Dryas ended.

The world became wetter and warmer.

At last, the weather was regular and
reliable.

Now it was perfect for farming.

This was a moment which has occurred
only a few times in the history of the

human species.

These farmers invented a whole new way
of life.

Ten thousand years later The
archaeologists are probing the desert

early farming in the fertile crevins.

But it's a vast landscape, and the hills
are now much drier.

They know the first farmers spread out
as their way of life developed.

So where did they go?

Philip Edwards has been thinking like a
first farmer.

He tried to see the land as they did.

At Zad 2, near the Dead Sea, the
researchers got it right.

Here are the precious remains of a farm.

Just three huts in a very unlikely
place.

Now, the first thing that strikes us is,
when we look around, is why here we

have a particularly barren landscape and
this site is right in the middle of a

treeless plain.

Nothing grows here.

They wouldn't have been able to rely on
any rainfall here. This is probably

equal to one of the driest places on
earth.

The kind of useful plant foods we find
here, barley, legumes, figs

and pistachios, particularly the nuts,
just could never have grown here.

Instead, they would have grown wild in
the surrounding hills.

These foods were important.

but they were very hard to reach.

So what made the farmers choose Zad?

Well, one good reason is that just a
couple of kilometres away behind me is

natural spring, and that would have once
flown right past the site and given a

plentiful supply of water.

Also, this erosion really wasn't here.
The land would have been a much flatter

plain. So what you did have here was a
place to have water trained, maybe, into

cultivated fields.

That's arguable, but that's one of the
best bets as to why people were here.

In the rubble, the team discovered the
vital proof of farming.

They found the remains of burnt seeds in
the fireplaces.

Because there were so many, Edwards knew
they must have been populated in the

fields around the hut.

So it's almost like this could be even
maybe a kind of gardener's or gardening

station. They're set out here to do that
kind of work.

By measuring the seeds shifted from this
dirt, the scientists discovered

something quite extraordinary.

The seeds are bigger.

than wild varieties.

It told them the barley had developed a
cultivated strain.

Without knowing it, these early farmers
at Zad were taking charge of evolution.

They were mimicking natural selection
and creating the first domesticated

varieties. One way in which the first
cultivators may have selected would be

by... taking plants, which may have come
from quite a long way away, and

planting them and building up a
population.

Now, they would choose, for example, a
type of wheat which had a particularly

large grain, which would give a higher
yield, or a barley which had, I don't

know, a nice taste or something like
that, and they'd bring these in and

up the population.

Early gardeners began influencing the
shape, size and structure of the grain.

what scientists call their morphology.

Over time, they made it much easier to
harvest.

The main difference between domesticated
cereals and wild cereals is in the

morphology of the ear.

Wild cereals lose their grains at
maturity. They fall to the ground.

In the domesticated cereals, the ear
stays intact.

In fact, it waits for the harvester to
come along and gather them.

Cereal grains took many hundreds of
years to change from their old, smaller

ancestors to the bulging heads we
recognise today.

Now the cereals were so much more
productive.

But there was a downside.

Crops had become a very serious and time
-consuming business.

A relentless chain of production, from
harvesting to winnowing and grinding.

It was very labour intensive.

Life was a lot less carefree.

Storage had become a large enterprise.

In fact, these farmers were the first to
build specialised granaries.

This new farming lifestyle came at a
cost.

In early farming burials, archaeologists
have found knee and shoulder bones that

are heavily deformed.

Strain injuries caused by the business
of brain processing.

And these people no longer had the time
to make the beautiful mortars of the

Natufians.

Instead, they used practical workhorse
tools to process large volumes of grain.

Well, this is a typical cup -hole
mortar. It's just basically a slab of

-hub. People just get a petal and start
grinding wheat or barley, such as you

see here.

start making an impression in the rock,
and gradually that gets deeper and

deeper through use, so that they're
making the thing as they're using it,

eventually, as you see, they start
another one when it gets too deep and

unwieldy to use.

Stone age archaeology requires sharp
eyes to pick the difference between

rocks and ancient artefacts.

farmers needed an even larger kit of
specialised tools, each carefully shaped

stone.

This is a small pick, and this is an
axe, for example.

And this is a small edge.

This is a large -sized axe.

As you can see, they bear their shape
and size.

And this is a limestone, axe and
limestone. These are flints.

the first farmers still relied on
hunting.

The country around Zad was arid and game
was becoming scarce.

They needed to improve the odds of
hunting to bring

down faster game at a distance.

So they invented the bow and arrow.

Perhaps they used it in human conflict,
but there's not enough evidence to tell.

In the long human journey, we can now
finally say these farming people had

settled down.

They had a village.

Mud and rock houses with a door and a
hearth built for a single family.

They lived in a small community.

These are the remains of the first
proper houses we find anywhere in the

Here we have here what is probably going
to be the entrance to this big teardrop

-shaped house. The walls are more or
less continuous all the way around, and

here we have a clear break.

So this may be where people came in.
Now, this hearth here is an arrangement

stones which, as you can see, have been
mortared in place.

Now, we've dug through the upper phase,
but when we found it, as it still partly

exists in the upper floor, it was really
mortared over all round.

It's clearly been set on the lower floor
and been used through successive build

-up of floors.

But they're large houses, six metres...

It's major axis and it's beautifully
made with limestone mortared into place

with some kind of local lime mortar.

They treated these huts as homes.

Each year they burnt the roofs to get
rid of the bugs.

The floors were levelled and remade.

Like the Natufian forebears, they buried
their dead under the floor.

Then they opened the graves and removed
the dried skulls.

They brought their ancestors back into
the world.

The skull remained undisturbed in its
position until it was excavated by the

team at Zad.

Most field archaeology happens in short
bursts.

Data is gathered in weeks and then
analysed over months.

We don't dig all day long. It's a matter
of four weeks, five weeks a year, or

sometimes each other a year.

And then we have all the top at work. So
by the time we come to the field, we

are really keen to dig and to get dirt,
in short.

So this is our holiday.

Each broken fragment and its locatum
tells a story.

The stones sometimes reveal something
extraordinary.

Inscribed drawings or pictographs.

The scratched lines mark a quantity.

It may be the first known record of a
number.

The biggest change created by farming is
more children.

A family could now feed lots of babies.

After all, many hands make light work.

For hunter -gatherers, it was just the
opposite.

They had to carry their small children
on long treks.

They had no more.

than they could manage.

Now, farming families could support
several generations to give the

storehouse of wisdom.

The trouble is, the farmers were on a
treadmill.

Once they began growing their own food,
there was no way of

going back because even if you are
unsuccessful, you still have some

And you learn how to keep a surplus
because you need to sow the seeds next

So basically, there is no, you cannot
stop farming. You can erase some of

farming lands when you have a series of
droughts and people will migrate to

another place.

But what is inherent in an agricultural
society is the number of kids

that with this kind of food.

You have an increasing number of kids.

Inevitably, populations grew.

More people, more farming, more food,
more people.

Humans were living on a larger scale
than ever before.

It was a huge challenge.

People had to be organized.

Now they needed leaders.

Once you have one biological viable
entity living in one village, say three,

four hundred people living in the
village, which means about, say, a

families, and they don't move, there is
naturally someone is going to become a

chief, right? So you have the beginning
of the emergence of social institutions,

having the elders and maybe having a
chief, maybe a shaman and so on.

At Jaf al -Akhmar in Syria,
archaeologists uncovered a much larger

In the middle of the ruins, they found a
building too large to be a house.

Instead, it was used to store large
amounts of grain.

It's a very big building, circular,
and...

When we began to dig this building, we
had to go two meters down because

the walls under us were two meters high.

And this building could be used for
storage, and the storing is

enormous. It cannot be a storing for one
people. It's a communal storing.

Then you have a bench where people can
sit and meet.

And probably you had also ceremonies in
this kind of house.

Families were giving part of their own
harvest to a single group granary.

Humans had taken a breathtaking step.

Our families and clans were united into
large organized communities.

We were now living in societies with
leaders.

Far away to the north, another continent
remained virtually unknown and

unchanged by its human inhabitants.

Across the vast expanse of Europe 9 ,000
years ago, a great forest stretched

from the Black Sea to the coast of
Brittany.

Here, people still lived as they always
had, hunting and gathering wild food,

moving from place to place.

Eventually, the revolution that began in
the fertile crescent would spread

across the rest of the world.

Nearly all our ancestors would take up
farming.

But for most, it would not happen for
many thousands of years.