Middle East: Epipaleolithic (original) (raw)
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Introduction
The Epipaleolithic period represents a time when everyone in the world was a hunter-gatherer. But, in the Middle East, these groups were the last of the hunter-gatherers because behavioral choices they made and subsistence strategies they undertook over the course of several millennia led to one of the key economic transitions in prehistory – the origins of agriculture and the domestication of herd animals such as sheep and goats.
Definition
As a term, the Epipaleolithic is used primarily in the Middle East to describe hunter-gatherer groups who lived in the interval from about 25,000 to 11,600 calendar years ago (Fig. 1). This temporal period represents the end of the Pleistocene epoch, which was characterized by a series of global cooling and drying events that resulted in glaciations and glacial retreats in northern latitudes. In the Levant (the region incorporating parts of modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel), behavioral decisions regarding subsistence...
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Authors and Affiliations
- Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, Penn Museum, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Deborah I. Olszewski
Authors
- Deborah I. Olszewski
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Correspondence toDeborah I. Olszewski .
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Editors and Affiliations
- Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Claire Smith
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