The first people in the land known today as Palestine were not a single group but a succession of human species and cultures stretching back more than 100,000 years. Modern humans (Homo sapiens) lived in the region between 120,000 and 90,000 years ago, making the southern Levant one of the earliest areas outside Africa where our species is found. From those ancient beginnings, the land saw Neanderthals, the world’s first settled villages, early farmers, copper-working artisans, and eventually the Canaanite city-states of the Bronze Age.
The Earliest Humans in the Region
Archaeological evidence shows that Homo sapiens occupied the southern Levant between roughly 120,000 and 90,000 years ago, then again from about 55,000 years ago onward. In the gap between those periods, Neanderthals moved into the region, living there from around 80,000 to 55,000 years ago. A site called ‘Ein Qashish in what is now northern Israel yielded Neanderthal remains dated to between 70,000 and 60,000 years ago, some of the few Neanderthal fossils ever found at an open-air site in the Levant.
This overlap and alternation between two human species makes the southern Levant one of the most important regions in the world for studying human evolution. Both species used similar stone tool technologies during this period, and the question of whether they interacted directly remains an active area of investigation.
The Natufians: First Settled Communities
For tens of thousands of years after the Neanderthals disappeared, the people living in the region were mobile hunter-gatherers who left behind stone tools but no permanent structures. That changed around 13,000 to 12,800 years ago with the emergence of the Natufian culture, a turning point not just for Palestine but for human civilization.
The Natufians were the first people in the Near East to build permanent villages. Their hamlets featured semi-subterranean pit-houses with stone foundations, roughly 3 to 6 meters in diameter, topped with brush and wood. They invested serious labor in their settlements: leveling hillsides for building platforms, hauling heavy undressed stones, producing plaster, and digging graves and storage pits. They carved large stone mortars for grinding wild grains and crafted elaborate bone tools, jewelry, and art objects.
These were not farmers. The Natufians were foragers who harvested wild cereals and hunted gazelle, but they stayed put year-round rather than following seasonal food sources. Their sedentary lifestyle laid the groundwork for the agricultural revolution that would follow.
Jericho and the First Farmers
The oldest remains at Jericho, one of the most famous archaeological sites in Palestine, date to the Natufian period. After a gap of nearly a thousand years, the site was resettled around 8,300 BCE by one of the world’s early farming communities. These people grew domesticated crops and built something remarkable: a massive stone perimeter wall 3.6 meters high and 1.8 meters thick at the base, alongside a tower standing 8.2 meters tall with an internal staircase of 22 dressed stone steps. Construction is dated to roughly 8,000 BCE.
The settlement covered about 2.4 hectares. Early excavators estimated a population of 3,000 to 4,000, but later research using ethnoarchaeological comparisons suggests 400 to 900 people is more realistic. Even that lower figure is extraordinary for a community more than 10,000 years old. These early farming villages, part of what archaeologists call the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period, represent some of the oldest known permanent towns anywhere on Earth.
Copper Workers of the Chalcolithic Period
By the mid-fifth to mid-fourth millennium BCE, the region’s inhabitants had developed a culture known as Ghassulian, named after the site of Tuleilat el-Ghassul in the Jordan Valley. These people were among the first in the world to work with copper while still relying heavily on sophisticated flint tools. They produced distinctive pottery, including V-shaped bowls and horn-shaped vessels called cornets, along with carved ivory figurines and elaborate basalt bowls.
The Ghassulian people lived in broad-roomed houses and buried their dead in community cemeteries located outside their settlements, sometimes placing bones in specially made clay ossuaries. Their craft specialization, from metalworking to ivory carving, signals a society with enough surplus food and organized labor to support artisans working in dedicated trades.
The Canaanites and the Bronze Age
Around 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, a distinctive Semitic-speaking culture emerged that we now call the Canaanites. They are often described as the first historically identifiable people of the region, known from both archaeological remains and references in texts from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Hebrew Bible. Sidon, one of their major city-states, flourished around 3,750 to 3,650 years ago.
Genetically, the Canaanites were not newcomers. A large-scale ancient DNA study published in Cell analyzed 73 individuals from Bronze and Iron Age sites across the southern Levant and found that people sharing Canaanite material culture descended from two sources: earlier local Neolithic populations (the descendants of those first farmers) and populations related to groups from the Zagros Mountains and the Caucasus region in what is now Iran and the surrounding area. This means the Canaanite population formed gradually through a blend of indigenous inhabitants and migrants from the northeast, rather than arriving as a single wave of settlers.
The Canaanites also gave the world one of its most consequential inventions. The earliest alphabet, from which virtually all modern alphabets descend, was created in Canaan in the late 18th or early 17th century BCE. Most surviving inscriptions in this early script were found near turquoise mines in the Sinai Peninsula.
Other Bronze Age Peoples
The land of Canaan was never home to a single ethnic group. Biblical and archaeological sources mention several peoples living in the region during the Middle and Late Bronze Age, including the Amorites, an ancient Semitic group; the Jebusites, who controlled Jerusalem until its capture by King David; the Hittites, connected to the powerful Anatolian empire to the north; and smaller groups like the Perizzites and Hivites. How distinct these groups were from the broader Canaanite population, whether they spoke different languages or simply organized into separate tribal units, remains debated.
The Philistines: Migrants From Europe
During the 12th century BCE, as Bronze Age civilizations collapsed across the eastern Mediterranean, a new group appeared along the southern coast. The Philistines, who gave their name to “Palestine,” settled in cities like Ashkelon, Ashdod, and Ekron. A 2019 genetic study published in Science Advances confirmed what archaeologists had long suspected: the early Iron Age population at Ashkelon carried a distinct European genetic signature, with southern Europe modeled as the best match for this incoming ancestry.
The study also revealed something striking. This European genetic signal faded within a few generations. By the later Iron Age, the Philistine population was genetically indistinguishable from the surrounding Levantine gene pool. The Philistines, in other words, were quickly absorbed into the local population through intermarriage.
A Genetic Thread Through Millennia
One of the most significant findings from modern genetics is how much continuity exists in the region. The same Cell study that analyzed Bronze Age Canaanite DNA found that present-day populations with geographic and historical ties to the Levant, including the great majority of Jewish groups and Levantine Arabic-speaking groups, carry 50% or more of their ancestry from people related to Bronze Age Levantine and Chalcolithic Zagros populations. The people living in Palestine today are, in a meaningful genetic sense, descended from the same deep ancestral pool that has inhabited the region for thousands of years.