The Real Garden of Eden

In 2003, Natalie D. Munro published an article in Mittielungen der Gesellschaft fur Urgeschichte entitled: “Small Game, the Younger Dryas, and the Transition to Agriculture in the Southern Levant.” I found certain parts of that article fascinating and would like to share them with you. I believe they may relate to the real, prehistorical “Garden of Eden.” What follows is my own, crude, two-page synopsis of the story which Munro tells us, placed within a cultural and historical context of my own choosing.

About 19,000 years ago, the glacial maximum of the Wurm period began to give way to the Bolling-Allerod interstadial and the climate became much warmer, which eventually brought about an end to big game hunting in Europe. As mammoth and other large game died out, people turned to small game hunting and more food gathering. People began to be more settled, and to develop local specializations for hunting and gathering. About this time, dogs were domesticated.

Then, about 14,500 years ago, the Bolling-Allerod warming trend sharply accelerated. The Fertile Crescent region turned much warmer and wetter, and food became radically more abundant. Semi-settled tribes in the southern Levant began living in fully settled villages, even though they did not yet practice agriculture or herding.

They built elaborate round, semi-sunken stone houses with slab-lined floors and built-in hearths. They collected wild grain and stored it in stone granaries, even though they were not yet planting or cultivating grain. Food was so abundant that these people could harvest grain, fruit, and meat from a permanent base without having to plant grain or raise herd animals. And since the climate was benign, little or no clothing was needed. This situation lasted for over a thousand years. This culture, the Early Natufian, was the first human society to have lived in comfort and security without struggle, toil, or continual migration. Many Near Eastern or Middle Eastern cultures have some myth, some folk memory of an Eden---a paradise. If these legends from the mists of our half-remembered past relate to an actual historical event, then this was the event. This was when and where it happened.

About 13,000 years ago, the climate turned sharply cooler and dryer, and remained so for 1,500 years, during the Younger Dryas period. Food became sparse, and villages were abandoned. The life of ease came to an end. The Early Natufian culture gave way to the Late Natufian, and migratory hunter/gatherer life was resumed.

Though the Natufians could no longer live in their villages, they still returned there as part of their annual migration, and to re-bury the bones of their dead. Bones of those who died and were buried elsewhere in the migration cycle were later exhumed and re-buried beneath the floors of stone houses which their tribe had once occupied, centuries earlier. I find this detail fairly poignant, as it reveals the disappointment, anguish, and grief the Natufians must have felt when forced to abandon their opulent garden and the life they had known there. Something new had entered human culture—the idea of “home.” Even though they could no longer live in these villages, they wanted to be buried there. After a thousand years of wandering, they still longed to “come home.”

By 11,500 years ago, (9,500 BC) the climate became warmer again. In semi-settled tribes of the foot hills of western Asia, (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran), men began domesticating wild sheep; women continued harvesting seeds of wild wheat and barley, and invented beer and bread; and the Mother Goddess religion was born. In the southern Levant, the old villages were occupied on a permanent basis again, with a population density that exceeded even the Early Natufian. But there was one striking difference; they were now practicing agriculture. They were planting and cultivating cereal crops on an intentional, full-time basis. Natufian culture had ended, and with it, the Pleistocene. And with the beginning of the Holocene, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPNA) had begun.

One should not be too quick to suppose that early agriculture was a form of “progress.” No doubt, these people had known of agriculture and practiced it on a small scale, experimentally, for thousands of years. But to embrace farming, full-scale, was not a choice they would ever have preferred. Farming with a sharp stick and a stone knife is not quite like driving an air-conditioned John Deere combine.

Primitive farming, stooped labor in the hot sun from dawn to dusk, is as depressing and as back-breaking a way to obtain food as one can imagine. No one who had ever successfully practiced hunting/gathering would ever choose this life except as a last, desperate attempt to stay alive. For the first thousand years after the advent of farming, the average human height decreased by several inches, and life expectancy decreased. Yet, ironically, farming a given area will support many times as many people as hunting. So as humans became more miserable, they also became more numerous. And since hunting requires much more land per person than farming, once a certain population threshold was passed, there could be no turning back to hunting. For better or worse, it was a one-way trip—a “point of no return” was reached—and from that point on, an ineluctable, and to some extent even predictable trajectory of human culture had been launched.