About 13,000 to 14,000 years ago, the process of sedentarization started in the Middle East, its populations abandoning progressively their nomadic lifestyle. With the amelioration of climatic conditions, food became more abundant, allowing them to settle down. In the Levant, the first hamlets appeared around 11,500 and were semi-permanent sites occupied by the Natufians. However, this tentative of sedentarization will be short lived, since a colder and dryer weather, the so-called Younger Dryas (10,800-9,600) [see the Chronological Table], will force these communities to return to nomadism. This period of colder weather will be of relatively brief duration, and with the return of a warmer and wetter climate, sedentarization will start again.
Though climatic conditions were determinant for sedentarization, the process itself has not been uniform in any way. In the first instance, geographical factors played an important role, some soils being more fertile and some regions more habitable than others did. In some cases, the scarcity of wild food accelerated the development of an autonomous food production. In other cases on the contrary, an area rich in plants facilitated the sedentarization process but delayed the passage to controlled food production.
Another important factor has been demographic growth. While an increase in population obliged some communities to expand the nutritional capacities offered by their environment, motivating the development of a more efficient food production, the opposite has been observed in all cases: an increase in nutritional possibilities has always provoked demographic growth. Occupying a surface of 100 to 150 square meters at the beginning of their sedentarization, most settlements will become hamlets of 2,000 to 3,000 square meters, and then big villages of 2.5 to 3 hectares. In turn, demographic growth will have important repercussions on the environment, transforming the natural balance that prevailed until then.
In most hunter-gatherers communities, tasks were divided along gender lines, with women organizing the camp and gathering fruit and cereals, while men were hunting. In most cases, this lifestyle will still prevail during the Neolithic.
Possessing a profound knowledge of plants built on generation after generation, women put their expertise into practice when they settled down. Hence, it is no exaggeration to say that women played a major and probably unique role in the development of agriculture. [See Appendix Lee]
Besides, being responsible for the setup of the camp and barely mobile because of the children, they were the first to adapt to the new sedentary lifestyle, and to give it its features and its definitions [7].
On the other hand, men continued to hunt to supply the community with meat. Their lifestyle remained, therefore, as it had always been, as it was at the time of nomadism [8]. Gone hunting most of the time, they were not there to help women solve the problems that sedentarization and agriculture brought with them. It will take many centuries before depleted game resources oblige these populations to turn to domesticated animals for their source of protein, marking men’s integration into the communal economy of production and their definitive sedentarization.