Author Archives: prehistorypodcast

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B was a time of great interaction and innovation across the ancient Near East. This period began with hunter-gatherers living in villages for some or all of the year in many parts of the Near East, but still reliant on collecting their food around the landscape. By the time this period ends,Continue reading “Episode 16: Collapsing the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B”

Now that we have had a look at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic in most of the Near East, we can have a look at the arrival of people on Cyprus and what we know about the Pre-Pottery Neolithic societies there. The earliest evidence that we currently have of people on Cyprus comes from the site ofContinue reading “Episode 15: Cyprus”

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East is known for a lot of changes to daily life compared with the earlier Epipalaeolithic. We have already looked at some of these major changes to the way that people lived, with the change from gathering to growing your own food, and settling down to live in villagesContinue reading “Episode 14: Networks and Inventions in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic”

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic in the Near East was a time of many firsts. In addition to changing the way that we lived and got our food, it was also the time when we got villages and village life. The first recognizable houses appear in the later part of the Epipalaeolithic. However, we don’t really thinkContinue reading “Episode 13: It takes a village”

After we had a look last week at how we went from gathering to farming plants, this week we are finishing off the change from getting our food in the wild to growing it at home by looking at the process of animal domestication in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) of the Near East. As withContinue reading “Episode 12: Domestication on the Hoof in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic”

Last week we looked at the second, Holocene half of the Epipalaeolithic. We saw that people in many parts of the Near East seem to have been settling down a bit more, and were building more permanent houses to live in. These houses also have evidence for storage, which may well have been happening inContinue reading “Episode 11: Bright Ideas? Experiments with Plant Domestication”

Last time we saw how the earlier part of the Epipalaeolithic differed from the Upper Palaeolithic mostly in terms of the degree of changes which had been gathering over the course of the later Upper Palaeolithic, rather than the sudden appearance of new techniques and traditions. The later Epipalaeolithic is more of a change thanContinue reading “Episode 10: Settling down in the Later Epipalaeolithic”

The Epipalaeolithic is a bit of a tricky period in the prehistory of the Near East. This is especially the case for the first half of the Epipalaeolithic. As a period, the Epipalaeolithic in the Near East runs from the Last Glacial Maximum at the end of the Pleistocene (beginning about 24/23-20,000 years ago), throughContinue reading “Episode 9: Distinguishing the Early Epipalaeolithic”

Last week we looked at new inventions of the Upper Palaeolithic. We also saw how while many of these new developments appear all over the Near East in the Upper Palaeolithic, much of the evidence that we have for people across the Near East suggests differences between groups of people within the individual regions ofContinue reading “Episode 8: Social Networking in the Upper Palaeolithic”

Last week we looked at the process of transition from the Middle Palaeolithic to the Upper Palaeolithic. This week we are starting to look at what life was like in the now human-only world of the Near East in the Upper Palaeolithic proper. We know from last week that the move into the Upper PalaeolithicContinue reading “Episode 7: Inventing the Upper Palaeolithic”