Original subtitles

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.