As populations grew, the Natufians had to extract more resources from the land. That meant grooming the land more carefully, and eventually it meant taking up some form of farming. The Natufians were falling into a honey trap. They had built their first villages in what seemed like an ecological paradise, but within just a few generations, they faced a new population crisis, and because neighboring communities were also growing fast, they could not just use more land. Instead, they had to use whatever tricks they knew of to increase the productivity of the land they already had. These
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