Not being a student of history, its often difficult for me to locate important events on a timeline and to see their relative importance and why they may have an influence on our lives today. The hypothesis that humans have a single origin was published by Darwin in 1859. There is significantly more evidence to support this theory today, apparently hominids diverged from chimpanzees 5-7 million years ago and a discovery within the last decade puts this nearer the earlier date. Modern humans, Homo Sapiens evolved in Eastern Africa 200,000 to 140,000 years ago and using genetic testing a much more accurate map of human ancestry and migration to all inhabited parts of the world is now available.
Apparently there is still much academic debate, which occasionally spills over to mainstream media, regarding the Recent African Origin (RAO) model. Around 60,000 years ago a group of 150-200 early humans made it out of Africa and proceeded to populate the rest of the planet. Ultimately surviving all earlier hominids that had journeyed out of Africa previously. Looking at the timeline at the top, in the last 800,000 years (80% of the last section of the 7) there were eight ice ages, each interspersed with warmer periods of around 10,000 years. The impact of the extreme cold on the planet does not only have the obvious effect, that of the ice sheets advancing across the northern hemisphere cutting off vital resources for these hunter gatherer communities, but also the locking up of water in these sheets meant that lower rainfall turned half the land between the tropics into desert. A torrid time then for the human race. About 12,000 years ago the last ice age was drawing to an end - temperatures rose, vegetation returned and animals spread into the former wastelands. The hunters followed. By this time in the Near East and Central America these humans had begun to develop new ways of producing food, farming had started. During the 150,000 years that preceded this time, modern humans numbered only in their millions and had migrated the globe foraging and hunting in small groups. This fundamental change in human behaviour signalled the start of the transition to modern society.
The Levant is an imprecise word with sometimes emotive definitions but in general it can be thought of to cover the area shown in the picture. I have chosen the picture that has a very arbitrary shading and uses ancient names for the regions comprising it, clearly modern day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories fall within this region. It is believed that the origin of the word is from archaic French and refers to 'rising' as the Sun rises in the East. This crucible of humanity is where 10,000 years ago these once migratory small groups of humans had advanced their agriculture sufficiently to allow them to remain in one location permanently. This is worth absorbing. After 7 million years from the split from chimpanzee, 200,000 years after modern Humans evolved, 60,000 years after migrating out of Africa, after beginning to domesticate animals and selecting genetically superior plants to farm, finally Humanity started to take root. Small villages with partially subterranean dwellings were clustered together in a community. Around 8000 BC then, during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), the world's first known town, Jericho, appeared in the Levant and was surrounded by a stone wall and contained a population of 2000-3000 people and a massive stone tower. It was a further thousand years before the inhabitants of modern day China would start cultivating rice and farming appeared in parts of the Aegean, it was not until c 4000BC before this reached the shores of Britain and maize was first cultivated in Modern Ecuador and Columbia around 3000BC. Tune in for part II, where I will explore what these pioneers in the Levant, our ancestors, did with all their spare time, now they were not hunting for food every waking moment.
