West Asia in the prehistory (before 3500 BC). Before writing, the record is stone, bone and DNA. These articles cover human origins, the ice ages and the first farmers, up to the moment cities and script appear.
Solecki's 1951 to 1960 trench at Shanidar Cave held 10 Neanderthals. In 2020 a Cambridge-led team reported an adult buried in a pit dug beside Shanidar 4.
· 60,000 BCA Natufian woman of about 45 was buried at Hilazon Tachtit, Galilee, 12,400–12,000 cal BP, with over 50 tortoise shells, a leopard pelvis and a human foot.
· 10,000 BCHunter-gatherers raised Göbekli Tepe's T-pillar rings about 9500 BC, before farming reached the region. Excavators now call it a settlement with rituals.
· 9500 BCKathleen Kenyon found an 8.2-meter stone tower at Jericho in the 1950s. Four named scholars still give four different reasons for why it was built.
· 8000 BCÇatalhöyük's East Mound, 13 hectares on Turkey's Konya plain, held roof-entered mudbrick houses with the dead under the floors, about 7100 to 5950 BC.
· 7100 BCLime-plaster statues on reed frames, buried in two pits at 'Ain Ghazal near Amman and lifted in 1983 and 1985, then conserved in London and Washington.
· 6750 BC
