Populations that had spent the preceding millennia adapting to cold, dry, and often harsh Ice Age conditions now found themselves in an environment of expanding resource richness.

Wild cereals — emmer wheat, einkorn, barley — grew in dense stands across the slopes and uplands of the region.

Nut-bearing trees spread as the forest expanded.

Herds of wild animals — aurochs, gazelle, deer, wild boar — grazed the grasslands and sheltered in the woodlands.

Rivers and seasonal streams filled with fish.

The people of this time, whom archaeologists classify under the general term Pre-Pottery Neolithic — or PPN — were largely mobile foragers and hunter-gatherers, though the picture is more nuanced than those simple labels suggest.

“Pre-Pottery Neolithic” is a period designation rather than a cultural identity, referring to the phase of the Neolithic before ceramic pottery became widespread, roughly from about 9,600 BCE into the eighth millennium BCE.