Abstract
The current view for the southern Levant is that wild game hunting was replaced by herd management over the course of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period, but there is significant debate over the timing, scale and origin of this transition. To date, most relevant studies focus either on wild game exploitation in the periods prior to domestication or on classic markers of domestication of domestic progenitor species over the course of the PPNB. We studied the faunal remains from the 2007–2008 excavations of the Middle PPNB (MPPNB) site of Yiftah’el, Northern Israel. Our analysis included a close examination of the timing and impact of the trade-off between wild game and domestic progenitor taxa that reflects the very beginning of this critical transition in the Mediterranean zone of the southern Levant. Our results reveal a direct trade-off between the intensive hunting of wild ungulates that had been staples for millennia, and domestic progenitor taxa. We suggest that the changes in wild animal use are linked to a region-wide shift in the relationship between humans and domestic progenitor species including goat, pig and cattle.
Highlights
There is growing consensus that the process of plant and animal domestication in southwest Asia was a multiregional phenomenon—that is, similar large-scale co-evolutionary processes occurred across a broad area, but played out differently at the local scale [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The current view for the southern Levant is that wild game hunting was replaced by herd management over the course of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period (PPNB: 10500–8250 cal, BP) [8,9,10,11], but there is significant debate over the timing, scale and origin of this transition
Human Hunting and Nascent Animal Management progenitor species over the course of the PPNB [3, 9, 15,16,17,18]. We consider these classic markers in our presentation of new faunal data from the most recent excavations (2007–2008) of the Middle PPNB (MPPNB) site of Yiftah’el (8200–7700 cal BC) [19], but the primary contribution of this paper is its close examination of the timing and impact of the trade-off between wild game and domestic progenitor taxa that reflects the very beginning of this critical transition in the Mediterranean zone of the southern Levant
Summary
There is growing consensus that the process of plant and animal domestication in southwest Asia was a multiregional phenomenon—that is, similar large-scale co-evolutionary processes occurred across a broad area, but played out differently at the local scale [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Human Hunting and Nascent Animal Management progenitor species over the course of the PPNB [3, 9, 15,16,17,18] We consider these classic markers in our presentation of new faunal data from the most recent excavations (2007–2008) of the Middle PPNB (MPPNB) site of Yiftah’el (8200–7700 cal BC) [19], but the primary contribution of this paper is its close examination of the timing and impact of the trade-off between wild game and domestic progenitor taxa (goat, pig and cattle) that reflects the very beginning of this critical transition in the Mediterranean zone of the southern Levant. Architectural remains from the MPPNB phase include small and narrow rectangular buildings with thick layers of repeatedly plastered floors
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