Are Late Pleistocene Environmental Factors, Faunal Changes and Cultural Transformations causally connected ? The case of the Southern Levant.

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Abstract
At the eve of the Epipaleolithic an irreversible transformation look place in the southern Levant from small nomadic bands of an ephemeral nature and high residential mobility into a sedentary social organization, while acquiring new properties such as labor division, intergroup identification and wide usage of storage facilities. The abrupt replacement of many small Geometric Kebaran seasonal sites with a few relatively large long-term Natufian habitations emerged, without traces of intermediate stages. This phenomenon is perhaps the most astonishing example of an increase in the level of complexity of social organization manifested throughout human history. It is argued, that the main socio-economic transformations in human evolution were basically detached from the impact of the environment, at least since the Upper Paleolithic, and may be explained, by the same basic innate self-organization properties that extend from DNA molecules to biosocialization. No causal and temporal, matching between the local cultural changes and. the global climatic events can be inferred, in particular during the abrupt shift to sedentisn in the early Natufian. and the transformation to incipient domestication during the PPNB. The cohesiveness of the southern Levantine paleo- communities lasted uninterruptedly from early Natufian to late PPNB. during which the Southwest Asian arid belt supported a. rich diversity of Palearctic species, relicts of which still occupy the mountainous region of this areas. It is argued that the southern Levantine climatic oscillations cannot he directly correlated, with the ecological, and physiological behavior of organisms ; certainly not with that late humans.