Kebaran culture

[1] Kebaran stone tool assemblages are characterized by small, geometric microliths, and are thought to have lacked the specialized grinders and pounders found in later Near Eastern cultures.

The Kebaran people are believed to have practiced dispersal to upland environments in the summer, and aggregation in caves and rock shelters near lowland lakes in the winter.

They are generally thought to have been ancestral to the later Natufian culture that occupied much of the same range,[5] who advanced the use of wild grains, building on the Kebaran traits to acquire some symptoms of permanent settlements, agriculture, and hints of civilization.

[6] Evidence for symbolic behavior of Late Pleistocene foragers in the Levant has been found in engraved limestone plaquettes from the Epipaleolithic open-air site Ein Qashish South in the Jezreel Valley, Israel.

[7] They suggest that the figurative and non-figurative images comprise a coherent assemblage of symbols that might have been applied in order to store, share and transmit information related to the social activities and the subsistence of mobile bands.

The Kebaran corresponds to the period of progressive warming at the end of the Pleistocene , which followed the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Climate and Post-Glacial expansion in the Near East, based on the analysis of Greenland ice cores .
Stone Age stone mortar and pestle, Kebaran culture, 22,000-18,000 BP
Engraved plaquette with bird image from Ein Qashish South, Jezreel Valley , Israel , Kebaran and Geometric Kebaran ca. 23,000-16,500 BP)