This paper examines community reorganization in the Late Natufian period with reference to a general ecological model that links changes in resource scarcity with social reorganization. This model explains why community reorganization should occur in times of subsistence stress, and provides a basis for generating multiple competing hypotheses to explain the nature of that transformation. One hypothesis, that Natufian communities responded to subsistence stress by centralizing land tenure, intensifying subsistence production, and redistributing subsistence goods, is not supported. An alternative hypothesis, that an unequal distribution of land within Natufian communities allowed some segments of the population to endure subsistence stress while forcing others to migrate to more marginal areas, explains more variability in the archaeological record, and withstands preliminary testing with multiple lines of archaeological evidence.

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This masters thesis investigates the environmental/climatic change that is thought to have brought about the economic shift and transition from Palaeolithic economic system of hunting gathering to Neolithic economic system of agriculture and domestication period around 11.000-10.000 years ago. This study uses the collected animal and plant data of the Natufian culture in the Levant region from the previous zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical literature anlyses. It shows a significant mathematical difference in the zooarchaeological assemblage measures between the Early and Late Natufian sites by calculating Economic value parameters of the Early and the Late Natufian sites, a comparison analysis was made in terms of percentage frequencies of animals site by site and between early-late periods. The result shows a significant animal food supply decrease and change-shift shown during the Younger Dryas climatic crisis times of the whole Late Natufian period sites total and early to late site by site individually, compared to whole Early Natufian period sites. It shows there is a possibility that some big-base camp Late Natufian occupation sites were better able to create coping mechanisms against food crisis/food shortage and more successfully than other Late Natufian sites during the climatic food crisis period. It shows supporting with the animal-plant data and changes in the human bones, burial practices, human teeth, diet changes and anthropological studies evidence, a big social-economic-cultural change and a huge food crisis was highly possible and humans highly possibly lived an economic crisis and an highly connected-related social-cultural crisis during the Younger Dryas in the Late Natufian times human societies.