10 000 BC

10 000 BC

• The 10th millennium BC spanned the years 10,000 BC to 9001 BC. It marks the
beginning of the transition from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic via the interim
Mesolithic, periods, which together form the first part of the Holocene epoch that is
generally reckoned to have begun c. 9700 BC and is the current geological epoch.
HOLOCENE EPOCH

• The main characteristic of the Holocene has been the worldwide abundance of Homo sapiens (humankind). The
epoch began in the wake of the Würm glaciation, generally known as the Last Ice Age, which began 109 ka and
ended 14 ka when Homo sapiens sapiens was in the Palaeolithic (Old Stone) Age.

• n the geologic time scale, there are three (tentatively four) stratigraphic stages of the Holocene beginning c. 9700
BC with the "Greenlandian" (to c. 6236 BC). The starting point for the Greenlandian is the
Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point sample from the North Greenland Ice Core Project, which has
been correlated with the Younger Dryas. The Greenlandian was succeeded by the "Northgrippian" and
the "Meghalayan". All three stages were officially ratified by the International Commission on Stratigraphy in
July 2018. It has been proposed that the Meghalayan should be terminated c. 1950 and succeeded by a new
stage provisionally called "Anthropocene".
BEGINNINGS OF AGRICULTURE

• The Natufian culture prevailed in the Levant through the 10th millennium and was unusual in that it supported a
sedentary or semi-sedentary population even before the introduction of agriculture. An early example is 'Ain
Mallaha, which may have been the first village in which people were wholly sedentary..The Natufian people are
believed to have founded another early settlement on the site of Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) where there is evidence
of building between 9600 BC and 8200 BC. Dates for the Natufian are indeterminate and range broadly from c.
13,050 BC to c. 7550 BC.

• Agriculture began to be developed by the various communities of the Fertile Crescent, which included the
Levant, but it would not be widely practised for another 2,000 years by which time Neolithic culture was
becoming well established in many parts of the Near East.
POTTERY

• Pottery is believed to have been discovered independently in various places, beginning with China c. 18,000 BC,
and was probably created accidentally by fires lit on clay soil.The main discovery of pottery dated to the 10th
millennium has been at Ounjougou (c.9400 BC) in Central Mali, providing evidence of an independent
invention of pottery in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• The first chronological pottery system was the Early, Middle and Late Minoan framework devised in the early
20th century by Sir Arthur Evans for his findings at Knossos. Dame Kathleen Kenyon was the principal
archaeologist at Tell es-Sultan