• A 1500 – 3000km land bridge joining present-day Alaska and eastern Siberia at various times during the Pleistocene ice ages (most recent about 25k to 14kya.
• This is the most likely path that pre-clovis (solutrean) settlers took to get to the new world.
• few resources, mirrors a modern bird flyway

• Narrow corridor between ice-sheets that clovis people followed south from Alaska.

• had serious obstacles for humans but most widely accepted route

• Evidence has suggested that the corridor would not have been habitable prior to 11kya, which is later than the earliest sites in America.

• Characteristically-fluted projectile points associated with the North American Clovis culture, date to the Paleoindian period around 13,500 years ago.

• Easier to tie at the end of spears and facilitated blood flow. Clovis culture was thought to be the first human culture in the new world, but that has recently been contested as new finds such as that at cactus hill in Virginia have been dated to between 13.5 and 15000kya

• Late Glacial world-wide cooling episode approximately 13,000 – 11,600ya
• Middle east, Late Natufian complex

•  Onset of drier climatic conditions:

-    shrinkage of forest zone
-    expansion of steppe/desert zones
-    dislocation in settlement patterns

Associated with

1. A climatic optimum (wetter and warmer)
2. expanded Mediterranean forest zone
   Large-sized mammals, medium and small-sized mammals
3. oak, pistachio, almond, hawthorne- good for providing food, nuts
           shrubby, not tall trees
4. wild cereal grasses- barley, wheat

o    small village sites with stone walled "huts" or houses
o    numerous burials
o    personal ornamentation and art (engraved stone)

Sites- Ain Mallaha, Wadi, El Wad

• Earliest Neolithic complex (pre-pottery neolithic) site, located in the West Bank. 9 – 10kya.
• Domesticated wheat and barley cultivated here at some point (early agriculture)
• Very unique in middle east, stairway inside up through it- protecting sacred place? Spring of water?, tower showed socio-political complexity, also plaster statues and plastered skulls (bone covered in plaster differently for each person, as if death masks, ancestor cult? Pray to ancestors?)