Hunter-gatherers establish the first settlement at ancient Jericho

Story: 9000 B.C.E.  |  Last updated: January 7, 0001

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Around 9000 B.C.E., people were already gathering at a spring-fed oasis near the Jordan River — a place that would eventually grow into one of the most continuously inhabited spots on Earth. What began as seasonal camps for Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers at early settlement Jericho would, over the next thousand years, become something the ancient world had rarely seen: a true town, with walls, a tower, and thousands of residents.

What the evidence shows

• Early settlement Jericho: Carbon-dated remains confirm human presence at the site by approximately 9000 B.C.E., making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on the planet.
• Neolithic agriculture: Grains of cultivated wheat and barley found at the site indicate that farming had taken root here during the transition from hunter-gatherer life — among the earliest such evidence anywhere in the Fertile Crescent.
• Stone tower construction: By around 8000 B.C.E., the community had organized enough to build a massive stone wall and at least one large stone tower, suggesting a population of roughly 2,000–3,000 people.

A spring that changed everything

The key to Jericho’s early importance is ʿAyn Al-Sulṭān — a copious natural spring that still flows today. In a region that was already becoming drier as the last Ice Age ended, a reliable freshwater source near fertile lowland soil was an extraordinary asset.

Hunter-gatherers from the Epipaleolithic period, part of a culture archaeologists call Natufian, likely returned to this spot seasonally before some groups began to stay. The transition from visiting to living there permanently is one of the great quiet revolutions in human history.

It was not a single decision. It was a slow accumulation — of trust in the land, of knowledge about which plants could be coaxed into yielding more, of social ties that made staying together worth more than moving on. Archaeological research on the Natufian period has shown that this transition from foraging to farming happened independently in several places across the ancient Near East, but Jericho is one of the sites where the evidence is clearest and oldest.

From camp to town in a thousand years

The speed of what happened next is striking. Within roughly a millennium of the first sustained habitation at the site, the people of Jericho had built one of the most impressive structures of the ancient world.

The stone tower at Jericho — standing nearly nine meters tall, with an internal staircase — remains one of the earliest known monumental constructions anywhere on Earth. UNESCO designated the Tall Al-Sulṭān site a World Heritage site in 2023 C.E., recognizing its exceptional importance to human history.

Building that tower required coordinated labor, shared planning, and some form of communal decision-making. The community that erected it was not simply surviving — it was investing in a future. That shift in thinking, from the present to the long term, may be one of the most significant turning points in human social evolution.

The excavations led by British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon between 1952 and 1958 C.E. were foundational in establishing the timeline. Kenyon’s meticulous stratigraphic methods helped reveal that the site had been occupied almost continuously through multiple distinct cultures — a depth of human presence almost unmatched in the archaeological record.

Agriculture takes root

The grains found at Jericho tell a story within the larger story. Cultivated wheat and barley don’t grow themselves — they require human intervention, selection, and care over many generations. Their presence at the site points to intentional farming, not just opportunistic harvesting of wild plants.

Because the immediate environment around the site may not have received enough rainfall to support cereal crops on its own, scholars believe irrigation was likely invented here — or adapted from practices developing elsewhere — to make farming viable. The Fertile Crescent’s role in early agriculture is well established, and Jericho sits at its southern edge, demonstrating that the agricultural revolution spread across a wide arc of the ancient Near East.

This first Neolithic culture at Jericho appears to have been, as Britannica notes, an indigenous development — not imported wholesale from elsewhere, but grown from the people already there. Around 7000 B.C.E., a second group arrived, likely from northern Syria, introducing new cultural elements while continuing the agricultural way of life.

Lasting impact

Jericho’s significance extends far beyond its own walls. What happened at this site — the shift from seasonal camps to permanent settlement, the development of agriculture, the construction of communal architecture — is part of the same broad transformation that made cities, writing, trade, and eventually all of recorded history possible.

The decision to stay, to plant, to build — made by people with no name in any record — set in motion one of the longest chains of cause and effect in human experience. Every city that exists today is, in some distant sense, downstream of that choice.

Jericho also demonstrates something important about resilience. The site was abandoned and resettled multiple times across thousands of years, by different peoples with different cultures. Its location — at a reliable spring, near a river crossing, in a strategic lowland — made it worth returning to again and again. The archaeology of the southern Levant documents this pattern across many sites, but none as continuously and dramatically as Jericho.

Blindspots and limits

The archaeological record at Jericho, while remarkable, is incomplete. Erosion has removed much of the town that existed during the periods scholars most want to study, and the people who lived here left no written records — their names, languages, and beliefs are largely beyond recovery. The precise reasons why certain groups arrived, why others left, and what daily life actually felt like remain matters of inference rather than knowledge. What we call “Jericho” across these millennia was not a single continuous community with a shared identity, but a succession of different peoples drawn to the same place — a distinction that matters for understanding what continuity actually means.

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