This is the first period in which architectural styles of the southern Levant became primarily rectilinear; earlier typical dwellings were circular, elliptical and occasionally even octagonal.

During this period, one of the main features of houses is a thick layer of white clay plaster flooring, highly polished and made of lime produced from limestone.

[2] The earliest proto-pottery was White Ware vessels, made from lime and gray ash, built up around baskets before firing, for several centuries around 7000 BC at sites such as Tell Neba'a Faour (Beqaa Valley).

They represent some of the oldest forms of art in the Middle East and demonstrate that the prehistoric population took great care in burying their ancestors below their homes.

[4] Danielle Stordeur's recent work at Tell Aswad, a large agricultural village between Mount Hermon and Damascus could not validate Henri de Contenson's earlier suggestion of a PPNA Aswadian culture.

Instead, they found evidence of a fully established PPNB culture at 8700 BC at Aswad, pushing back the period's generally accepted start date by 1,200 years.

The culture disappeared during the 8.2 kiloyear event, a term that climatologists have adopted for a sudden decrease in global temperatures that occurred approximately 8,200 years before the present, or c. 6200 BC, and which lasted for the next two to four centuries.

Later, geneticists in 2022 using 1.2 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), discovered that the ancient DNA of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of Mesopotamia and Anatolia, showed that these populations were formed through admixture of pre-Neolithic sources related to Anatolian, Caucasus, and Levantine hunter-gatherers.

[25] Altınışık, N Ezgi et al. (2022) studied 13 genomes from the PPNB at Cayonu, Turkey, and found they were formed by an admixture event between western and eastern populations of early Holocene Southwest Asia.

The PPNB in general exhibited strong evidence of gene flow from populations related to Anatolia compared to the earlier Natufian hunter-gatherers.