The Hilly Flanks is a broad arc of the Middle East associated with some of the earliest known farming villages and domesticated plants. Its historical significance, as presented in the book, is not that it alone possessed the wild species from which crops could be domesticated. Rather, its Natufian communities had settled before they began farming, and their archaeological remains suggest that hierarchy and political organization were already taking shape in this transition.

Setting and Early Farming

The Hilly Flanks extend from the south of modern Israel, through Palestine and the western bank of the Jordan River, via Syria and southeastern Turkey, and into northern Iraq and western Iran. Around 9500 BC, emmer and two-row barley were found at Jericho, on the western bank of the Jordan, while Tell Aswad, farther north in Syria, yielded emmer, peas, and lentils. Both places belonged to the Natufian cultural sphere and supported large villages; Jericho may already have had a population of about five hundred.

This early evidence belongs to a wider transformation in human life. Farming and herding involved domesticating plants and animals by intervening in their life cycles, gradually selecting traits that made them more useful as food. But the presence of candidate wild species does not by itself explain why cultivation began in one place or among one people. The book stresses that the wild ancestors of many domesticated plants and animals ranged across immense areas of Eurasia. The Hilly Flanks were well endowed with wild crops, but they were not uniquely so.

Natufian Settlement Before Agriculture

The Natufians’ settled life preceded their adoption of farming. Evidence from gazelle teeth, whose layered cementum records seasonal growth, indicates that gazelles were killed at Natufian sites in every season. Since the last layer can help establish whether an animal died in summer or winter, this pattern supports the conclusion that people remained in these settlements year-round rather than returning only seasonally.

Abu Hureyra, on the Euphrates, provides an especially well-documented sequence. Archaeologists have examined its layers for almost forty years. The settlement probably began around 9500 BC, and its inhabitants continued as hunter-gatherers for roughly five hundred years before switching to agriculture. Before farming, its population is estimated at between one hundred and three hundred. The site therefore demonstrates that settlement did not depend on an agricultural economy: people could remain in one place while still hunting and gathering.

The practical attractions of staying put included the ability to store food and avoid the costs of moving. Children and older people had to be carried during travel, while heavy tools such as grinding stones and sickles were inconvenient to transport. Even mobile hunter-gatherers stored food in selected locations, including caves; crops such as maize would later prove especially valuable in part because they stored well. The accumulation of food stocks could thus encourage a settled life, though it does not by itself explain how settled communities organized access to land and other resources.

Hierarchy and the Organization of Community

Settlement also brought problems. People who had built permanent structures and accumulated possessions had less incentive to resolve disagreements simply by moving away. Communities needed ways to determine who could use nearby land, gather fruit from particular trees, or fish in particular parts of a stream. That required rules, and institutions to make and enforce them.

Natufian archaeological evidence points to social differentiation before farming. Some graves contained substantial quantities of obsidian and dentalium shells brought from the Mediterranean coast near Mount Carmel, as well as necklaces, garters, and bracelets made from shells, canine teeth, and deer phalanges. Other people were buried without such ornaments. Since obsidian and shells were traded, control of exchange may have helped accumulate power and inequality.

At Ain Mallaha, north of the Sea of Galilee, archaeologists found about fifty round huts and many pits apparently used for storage, alongside a large, heavily plastered building near a cleared central place. The building was probably the house of a chief. Some burials were more elaborate than others, and evidence of a skull cult—possibly connected with ancestor worship—appears at the site and at other Natufian settlements, especially Jericho. Taken together, these traces support the interpretation that Natufian communities had political hierarchies, nascent religious practices, long-distance trade, and institutions governing the inheritance of elite status.

Historical Significance

The book treats the emergence of political elites as a likely part of the transition first to sedentary life and later to agriculture. It proposes that settling down may have required a concentration of power capable of maintaining order and enforcing property rights, while also allowing those who held authority to extract resources. This is an interpretation of the archaeological evidence, not a directly observed account of how the first Natufian institutions formed.

The distinction between settlement and farming is central to the argument. In the conditions associated with the Long Summer, wild crops were more abundant, and hunting and gathering could remain an attractive way to live. A settled community did not necessarily seek to maximize agricultural output; people might be satisfied with subsistence that required relatively little effort. The Hilly Flanks therefore represent more than a geographic starting point for cultivation: their evidence complicates any simple account in which abundant species or technological possibility alone produced farming. Settlement, social organization, and the institutions governing resources also mattered.