Page "Natufian culture" Paragraph 8

Authors such as Christopher Ehret have built upon the little evidence available to develop scenarios of intensive usage of plants having built up first in North Africa, as a precursor to the development of true farming in the Fertile Crescent, but such suggestions are considered highly speculative until more North African archaeological evidence can be gathered.

Anthropologist C. Loring Brace in a recent study on cranial metric traits however, was also able to identify a " clear link " to North African populations for early Natufians based on his observation of gross anatomical similarity with extant populations found mostly in the Sahara.

Brace believes that these populations later became assimilated into the broader continuum of Southwest Asian populations.