Environmental setting of the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution across the Fertile Crescent

作者：Mordechai Stein, A. Nigel Goring‐Morris, Yoav Ben Dor, Yigal Erel · 发表于：Quaternary Science Reviews · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1016/j.quascirev.2025.109265 · 被引用次数：6 · 研究领域：Archaeology and ancient environmental studies、Geology and Paleoclimatology Research、Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology

The transformation of human culture from hunter-gatherer societies to sedentary farming communities represents the most prominent revolution in human history, termed the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution (NAR). The NAR was manifested in the cultivation and domestication of wild plants across the ‘Fertile Crescent’ from around the 11th millennium BP. Here, we investigate the environmental conditions that enabled the establishment of the first agricultural settlements in the southern Jordan Valley and compare these settings to the northern segments of the ‘Fertile Crescent’ (northern Mesopotamia). In particular we investigated the mineralogical composition of surface cover soils and the hydrological conditions in the Gilgal Basin where a few of the early agriculture settlements of the late Natufian-PPNA cultures were established. We focused our study on the Salibiya sedimentary section (and archeological sites) in the Gilgal Basin, where a sequence of fine detritus sediments accumulated during the post glacial to the early Holocene period. OSL ages from the Salibiya sedimentary section lie between ∼24 and 11 ka BP, spanning the time of Lake Lisan retreat from its highest stands of ∼180 ± 10 m below mean sea level (= m bmsl) to below 320 m bmsl. The Salibiya sedimentary section consists of silty detritus sediments that comprise recycled mountain soils washed from the adjacent Samarian Mountains to the Gilgal Basin. The ‘mountain soils’ in their turn consist of desert dust grains...