It is difficult even for an experienced comparative zoologist to tell which are the bones of domesticated animals and which are those of their wild cousins. This is especially so because the animal bones the archeologists find are usually fragmentary. Furthermore, we do not have a sort of library collection of the skeletons of the animals or an herbarium of the plants of those times, against which the traces which the archeologists find may be checked. We are only beginning to get such collections for the modern wild forms of animals and plants from some of our nuclear areas. In the nuclear area in the Near East, some of the wild animals, at least, have already become extinct. There are no longer wild cattle or wild horses in western Asia. We know they were there from the finds we’ve made in caves of late Ice Age times, and from some slightly later sites. SITES WITH ANTIQUITIES OF THE INCIPIENT ERA So far, we know only a very few sites which would suit my notion of the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication. I am closing this chapter with descriptions of two of the best Near Eastern examples I know of. You may not be satisfied that what I am able to describe makes a full-bodied era of development at all. Remember, however, that I’ve told you I’m largely playing a kind of a hunch, and also that the archeological materials of this era will always be extremely difficult to interpret. At the beginning of any new way of life, there will be a great tendency for people to make-do, at first, with tools and habits they are already used to. I would suspect that a great deal of this making-do went on almost to the end of this era. THE NATUFIAN, AN ASSEMBLAGE OF THE INCIPIENT ERA The assemblage called the Natufian comes from the upper layers of a number of caves in Palestine. Traces of its flint industry have also turned up in Syria and Lebanon. We don’t know just how old it is. I guess that it probably falls within five hundred years either way of about 5000 B.C. Until recently, the people who produced the Natufian assemblage were thought to have been only cave dwellers, but now at least three open air Natufian sites have been briefly described. In their best-known dwelling place, on Mount Carmel, the Natufian folk lived in the open mouth of a large rock-shelter and on the terrace in front of it. On the terrace, they had set at least two short curving lines of stones; but these were hardly architecture; they seem more like benches or perhaps the low walls of open pens. There were also one or two small clusters of stones laid like paving, and a ring of stones around a hearth or fireplace. One very round and regular basin-shaped depression had been cut into the rocky floor of the terrace, and there were other less regular basin-like depressions. In the newly reported open air sites, there seem to have been huts with rounded corners.