<HTML>Hi Don,
Your post makes a few very common wrong assumptions (and I mean very common amongst the general public). Hominins have been gatherers for 5 million years. Agriculture isn't something anyone "aspired" to or an inevitable "direction" which was headed towards. Hunter-gatherers had and have a very rich lifestyle and it isn't something that is debased by comparison to agriculture. The nutrition of the first agriculturalists was poorer than their hunter-gatherer counter-parts, their health was worse.
As for the timing, I think you'll find these paragraphs from McCorriston and Hole interesting:
"The Southern Levant is a highly diverse topography with a multitude of contrasting and changing environments packed into a very small area. This dynamic diversity has been critical to the emergence of new economic plant species and to human cultural innovations.
"The modern landforms of the Southern Levant took shape during the Pleistocene as a result of tectonic activity, vulcanism, cycles of erosion and deposition, and changing sea levels. Never before had there been quite the same combination of climate, topography, vegetation, fauna, and human activity as occurred at the end of the Pleistocene, and we no longer have the same mix today. These conditions - a complex and changing physical environment - coupled with an unstable climate that developed marked seasonal aridity, resulted in the repeated creation and destruction of habitats, each successive one different from those preceeding. This process continues today with the added element of extensive human intervention, which has affected both the geological and atmospheric processes by eradicating plants and animals from the Mediterranean lands.
"During the late Pleistocene, topography and climate in the eastern Mediterranean converged to form a series of lakes, which had important effects on the local environment, on human settlement, and on the evolution of domestication. Although one can find contemporaneous lakes in a variety of settings, as well as similar climatic conditions where there are no lakes, nowhere else in the Near East did comparable circumstances prevail. These lakes existed on the plateau and wadis east of the Jordan Valley, in the Sinai, and in the Jordan Valley itself. Evidence shows that from 20,000 to 13,000 b.p. there was a considerable reduction in the surface water of the Southern Levant. By the time of the Holocene transition, the shallow interior lakes had dried up and Lake Lisan had divided into its component basins (Huleh, Galilee, and the Dead Sea). This drying coincides with increasing signs of sedentism and the abandonment of sites in the marginal regions.
"At the end of the last glaciation, the shallow lakes throughout the Near East, as well as in Arabia and North Africa provided dependable surface water, attracted game, and became foci of human activities. When these lakes began to dry up, the territory that could be utilized by people was correspondingly reduced, resulting in a shift of site location toward more permanent sources. While Lake Lisan was too saline for most aqueous life, and people would have been unable to acquire food from it, Lake Huleh and Lake Beisan (now the Sea of Galilee), which take in fresh water and have exits to the Jordan River, have always been fresh, unlike the Dead Sea, Lake Lisan's modern relict.
"Although there is some question about relative dates, the lake data as well as pollen show a lag in the onset of drying in the north as compared with the south. In the Southern Levant, archaeological evidence suggests "a dry period around 20-14,000 bp, then around 14,000-10,000 an increase of wetness" (Bar-Osef in roberts 1982:270). The lakes clearly show the former, but not the latter. Nevetheless, the late Pleistocene in the Levant was a time of "significant paleoenvironmental dynamism" (Clark et al. 1988:275). This dynamism and the particular forms it took given the unique topographic and climatological circumstances of the Southern Levent, were critical to the emergence of the requisite annual species and the way humans were able to use them."
An idea which people should get away from is that <Homo sapiens</i> from the outset could suddenly transform themselves into some advanced civilisation. Evolution doesn't happen that way. Evolution is gradual, each step building upon the blocks which went before it. Simply because people had stone tools does not make them inferior in any way. Stone age cultures were very sophisticated, imo, particularly the Howiesonspoort industry of southern Africa. The only real advantage I have found in the wild of a steel blade over a shape stone tool is simply that the steel goes for longer periods before resharpening. Stone tools are very effective killing and dismembering, and gathering tools. I've personally resharpened an original Middle Stone Age tool - it sliced through the nearby vegetation very effectively (luckily I didn't run it too hard over my skin;-) ). The Bushmen rock art paintings too, magnificent !
Mike.</HTML>
