The Natufians built the first villages and founded Jericho, which became the world’s first true city. So they were very settled people. But they didn’t farm. This was most unexpected. However, other excavations across the Middle East showed that it was not uncommon for people to settle in permanent communities long before they took up farming—sometimes by as much as eight thousand years. So if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea—or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them are right.
