Long before anyone built a kiln on purpose, the ground itself may have shown people how. A new study argues that a wave of prehistoric wildfires in the southern Levant, more than 9,000 years ago, scorched the region so thoroughly that it left behind naturally baked clay — and that Neolithic communities, watching the aftermath, […]

Around fifteen thousand years ago, the hunter-gatherer communities that populated the southern Levant experienced a radical transformation in their social and spatial organization. Those groups that until then had maintained a nomadic lifestyle, moving with the herds and the seasons, drastically reduced their mobility and established the first permanent settlements known in the region. This […]