The Natufians

BY ASTRA LINCOLN

On an earthen shelf with a curved lip, there are two preserved martens, cat-like even after death. The fur along their milk bottle bodies is pine colored and falling off in clumps, but the tail of each mammal remains feather-duster full. Long black feathers studded with white surround the martens. There are also partial remains of a wild boar, a leopard, and the oblong bones from a cow tail. Each of these relics has been mottled by fine clay dust and time but the way they are gathered still makes them nearly vibrate with reverence. The skeleton of a tiny woman is curled around the bodies of these beasts. She lies on her left side, as though in repose. Her spine arcs along the wall of the cave she was found in and her angular legs are tangled, criss-cross-applesauce. Her pencil-thin metacarpals open towards an entire, preserved human foot. The corpse of the woman is surrounded by the shells of more than 50 tortoises, although many have separated along the natural sutures that in life bind the shells’ many hexagonal plates, as a result of 12,000 years worth of decomposition. 

The woman’s corpse and the tomb it was found in is an archaeological relic from the earliest known group of humans that learned how to stay. We call them the Natufians. We know that they stay because of their elaborate funerary rites: you don’t spend months collecting tortoises to steward your beloved into the afterlife if you don’t have many months to kill in the first place. When they settled, near what is now known as Jericho, in Palestine, agriculture had not yet been invented. Yet they stayed. They built homes, and roofs, and performed elaborate burial rituals for the shamans who guided them. They kept each other safe. This old woman, for example—the researchers who found her knew her age by her teeth, well-worn from a life of good eating. Calcium rounded from variety and good taste. Fats and fruits and meats: a full life. The coccyx and sacrum bones of her pelvis were welded shut, indicating that she would have walked with a heavy limp, and then not walking at all. After millions of years of beasts, of tales of evolution that hinge on the abandoning of the weak to the wolves, these people stayed. The Natufians settled among the groves of wild pistachios and built semi-subterranean homes. And this disabled woman lived there; the first housing structures in human evolution were accessible. The Natufians celebrated this woman. Her immobility charmed them. Her bonds with her neighbors -- the first neighbors in human history! -- must have been hefty, cured as though by salt, not just the time that gathers when people stay put, stay together. They buried her with bowls carved out of scratchy, black basalt. 

Today, the one-thousand kilometer long region from the Taurus Mountains in Turkey to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, known as the Levant, has dry, dead air and plants with thorns. Not always. When the Natufians decided to settle in the Levant, the rolling hills had a Mediterranean breeze, sticky and cool, rustling oak leaves on high branches. It rained a meter a year then. Paleoclimatic records indicate there would have been more than one hundred edible varieties of fruits, seeds, and leaves. Imagine them feasting. Imagine a sheet of limestone, laden with greens and mauves, brought to this woman where she sat in the shade with her back resting on the alligator-skin bark of a pistachio tree. Imagine the time it would take to scavenge 50 tortoises to keep the shaman-woman company after she died. Unlike humans, tortoises live alone. Unlike the Natufians, the reptiles aren’t sedentary. They didn't stay put and wait for you to find them.

When I was 22, I moved to Grenoble, France, and made it four months before I became unsheltered. By then, I had been experiencing intermittent houselessness for seven years. For months before finally succumbing to my pennilessness and moving out of my month-to-month room on the third floor of an apartment building with peeling wallpaper and gas burners that shot sparks, my morning ritual had consisted of helping myself to the free samples from the farmer’s market under the interstate. As fall steeled into winter and the vendors’ supply of samples thinned like deciduous leaves, I began to fill coat pockets with cheese and nuts from the grocery store. After slipping some bargain brie into my purse, I would wander to the biologiques and spend a long time analyzing the shelves of chocolate. I reached for a bar, a startlingly-close voice asked me, “Do you believe in that stuff?” 

It was the supermarket’s security guard. I laughed. 

“I don’t know if belief has anything to do with it.” 

We held eye-contact for a few seconds. He broke a smile. 

“You don’t buy it?” I asked him. 

“I don’t buy it. I don’t know what all this labeling is about.” 

I laughed again. “You’re right,” I conceded while I blinked three times through lashes I had dutifully painted black, anticipating that I might need to flirt my way out of thievery. I winked as I left the aisle, then the store, over-gripping the Reblochon in my pocket, puncturing its waxy wrapping with a nail. 

Each week I could afford only one half-dozen eggs and one red cabbage. When cooked together, the albumen would take on the devastating hue of an old bruise. I wasted money on wine. A bottom-shelf Beaujoulais would justify my presence at communal dinners. Several of these friends had me over for dinner just to send me off with bags of canned goods. I swiftly ended each relationship, embarrassed as I was that they’d seen through my act of well-adjustedness and straight through to the desperate, wild-animal-truth of me, which was that I had been so hungry for so long that I’d had hives all over my arms for the better part of the fall and into the winter. I had stopped menstruating. I regularly fainted in public. I woke up in parks to men rifling through my pockets. 

I moved out mid-month in January, stowed my bags in one of my remaining friend’s closets, and began hitchhiking. Across France, into Belgium, through cold northern countries which I shouldn’t have traveled through without owning a warm jacket. I stood on road shoulders and fielded questions from men in tailored twills, curious whether I had a nightly price. I didn’t. How much for those lips. How much are you willing to give for one night indoors. These men orbited me like crows, with beady eyes and a sense of possession stronger than any I had had, even as I owned so few things and relied on each of them so desperately. My single warm layer was a knit wool sweater. The cowl neck was lined with loons, cat-scratch holes where there should have been wings. 

“These men orbited me like crows, with beady eyes and a sense of possession stronger than any I had had, even as I owned so few things and relied on each of them so desperately.”

The only men I let take me were truckers. Men with collages of many accents. I found them at gas stations where I had slept in bathrooms left unlocked overnight. One man I stayed with through three national borders. He had learned English, his third language, from somebody who spoke it as a second tongue. It was Irish and English and Polish. He anglicized French words. His colossal pores were gaping mouths. At least four pores that I could see from my spot five feet away from him on the semi-truck’s wide bench seat looked like they could have accommodated the tip of an unsharpened pencil lead. We drove north across Belgium and then continued through most of Holland through the groaning day. The sun fell like damp sheets onto rotten, oil-slicked snow that had been gathered into half-melted heaps, defeated, deflated like balloons. For hours the truck driver only looked my way in flashes, the way one looks when they want to take heed of the social obligation to recognize and be recognized. He looked at me quickly and in bird-like twittering tilts of the head. It was the kind of quick glance that’s more an act than an experience -- the tilt of the head symbolizing acknowledgment even though we both know nothing was actually seen, let alone me, let alone the truth of me, my fidgety hands or cheek pinched between teeth. 

Over the whirring radiator, he asked me, “What the fuck were you doing there?” when he misheard me claim Grenoble, France, and instead thinks I’ve come from Chrenoble. 

“You’d better fucking stay out of there,” he told me. I smiled wryly at his special attention to the imperative through his accent that’s caught halfway between Eastern European intonation and rural American sentence construction. My heart swelled with love for his sentences. 

“There are giant mutant wolves that’d maul that pretty face right off of you.” 

He jerked his head halfway towards me again but was clearly still not seeing me, but an amalgamation of the road’s speed-blurred lines and his imagined, mutated wolves. I made an effort to really look at him. He had so many neck-rolls that it made me wonder why we call them ‘chins’, these oblong fat pockets that dangle freely from and radiate away from it with increasing girth and decreasing angularity or likeness to the chin bone below. 

“They stand on their hind legs and they’re bigger than you or me, bigger still than we’d be if you were on top of me, if I had put you on my shoulders. They’re fucking grizzly, man.” 

He lifted his hand above his head to show how much taller still a standing Russian wolf mutant would be. Because we were in the cab of a semi-truck, his fully extended arm, with its Christmas-ham sized bicep, didn’t come close to touching the roof. With his hand still above his head he looked at me, but only to make sure that I was rapt to his demonstration. He bore his teeth, then, which maybe was supposed to be emphatic, but instead acted as a diminutive show of how covered his teeth were in coffee grounds. I wondered what color the gums of wolves are. This man’s gums were somehow simultaneously pink and coffee-stained yellow. It’s slightly affronting to see two distinct colors overlaid like that in the interior of a human mouth. The color

was sour against his caffe crema skin. Finally his side-eye sensed that my gaze had been lingering and I knew that this is why he suddenly smirked. I hated it. I looked away, fiddled with the cardboard in my bag. It was still wet and the ink leaves traces on my fingertips when I touch it. The man finally took his turn to look straight at me. He didn’t blink. I felt doubly uncomfortable then, both because being seen, especially long or longingly, feels like being a woman with a man inside who is watching a woman; and also because it meant he was no longer looking down at the road, but down the length of my body. I rubbed the blue and red on my fingertips together until they were like rotted figs. The texture of my days as they bled into years. 

_________________________ 

It took me nearly a decade to work up the courage to sign a lease for the first time. It was two months after the first pandemic lockdowns happened in California, where I had more or less landed in a sedentary lifestyle after having returned from Europe and then spending the bulk of my mid-twenties living in cars, sometimes mine and sometimes other people’s. I flitted through towns where it was “cool” to live in parking lots, and where it may signify a type of rambunctiousness instead of solely desperation: Eugene, Oregon. Tucson, Arizona. Bishop, California. These are towns whose parking lots have nicknames like “The Dark Corner.” Cops that knock on the side doors of campervans to try to return the wallet of some beheaded youth that was abandoned in the brewery parking lot. Those were years when I’d wake up in a cold sweat nearly every morning, no recollection of where exactly I was. Or, I’d wake up and a man I barely knew would have spotted my car and parked in the adjacent spot to await my waking and I’d have to sneak from the bed in the trunk through the two front seats while somehow staying invisible and somersault into the driver side, rev the engine and floor it. Or, I’d wake up and the memory-foam pad from Walmart that worked as a simulacra of a real bed would have frozen solid while I’d slept. My body would be sunken into a mattress-crevasse, cocooned by hard, geometric ice. 

Signing a lease, it turns out, wasn’t a cure-all. This is in part because of the evergreen din of terror that no amount of therapist-recommended breathing exercises can shake out from my insides. The hurt is so intimate as to feel familial. It is the same pain I felt at 15 when the pantry shelves in my childhood home finally went all-the-way empty; it is the pain at the knowledge, half a life later, that I will never outgrow the biological memory of childhood hunger. When I give into it, the pain places a filter over everything. The memory of incandescent street lights flickers over my field of vision. I flash back to the first nights I slept in my car as a 16 year-old in a church lot on top of a hill that overlooked the sinking California valley. The many parking lots thereafter. For a moment, I’m back inside that buzzing parking lot glow, the polluted ochre shimmer of the middle distance. Suddenly, everything is again soaked orange. I carry this with me. I apply it like varnish. Every new home’s walls are painted with the same bile-tinted nervousness. 

Renting a room had another noteworthy pitfall: a lease does not protect one from eviction. My notice came in 2020, just after the first, federal moratorium on pandemic-time evictions lapsed. The letter landed like a gut-punch.

For the weeks leading up to my eviction, the lease-termination date stole my sleep. Nightly, I watched it peacock across the backs of my eyelids in lit-up neon lettering, the letters soft-boiled gold and glittering, shooting off emoji-like sparks, making a festival out of my manic unrest. The date would fade into nightmares about contracting the virus just days before I had to leave, wondering who would pack my boxes if I became hospitalized. 

I am still one of the luckier ones. Like all hard things that try to break us, cycles of homelessness fall upon racialized lines. I’m white. I’ve never been legally evicted. Using data collected by Eviction Lab between 2012-2016, the ACLU has found that “Black renters have eviction filed against them by landlords at nearly twice the rate of white renters”, likely because wealth gaps and pay disparities (which are especially prevalent among Black women) work to justify and amplify racial discrimination. The same research shows that Black women are subsequently more likely to be denied housing if they have previously been evicted -- and in the United States these evictions stay on record for seven years. Upon becoming unhoused, people of all races and genders face an increased likelihood of contracting Covid-19. Of dying in the cold. Of dying in the heat. 

At some point in the 12,000 years since the Nafutians first moved indoors, living this way has become an existential necessity. As the climate warms, the stakes of this truth become higher. This June in British Columbia, Canada, where I now live, the total number of sudden, unpredicted deaths tripled over the course of a single, four-day extreme heat event. The temperatures surged 30-to-40 degrees Fahrenheit above average, and remained. At least 400 people died from heat-related illness across the province. Lytton, a town in the province on First Nations land, broke the national record for highest recorded temperature on a Saturday. Then it broke its own record on Sunday, and for a third time on Monday. On Tuesday, the town caught fire. 90% of the structures burned in the blink of an eye. On Wednesday, a few hundred kilometers east of Lytton, the heat began several dozen other fires, whose cumulative heat grew so strong it created its own weather. A pyrocumulus cloud formed. It dispelled energy as bolts of lightning: 710,117, in fact, over the course of just 15 hours. 62 fires were discovered by morning. 

______________________ 

Just months before my eviction, I had sold the last car I ever lived in. My partner at the time scolded me. 

“You might need a spot to sleep again.” 

I had laughed at him. It was November then, all angular sunshine and the chill of the first frost that lingers for ages, the aspens rusted past red. 

“I’m never going to be unhoused again.” 

When I said those words, it felt like the bravest, truest thing I’d ever said. A few months later, I signed the lease on this room with a fireplace and the forest overlook and the truly

excellent hearth to hang my houseplants off of, out of reach from my nibbling cat. From the deck of the home-that-is-not-my-home, I sipped coffee forever and reveled in the knowledge that it’ll keep me from wanting food I still feel like I can’t afford. I watched the clouds of pollen swell and sink. Little yellow specks of everything shimmer in the hard light. I counted out which friendships I haven’t already overstayed my couch-time, which ones I’m willing to burn when the shame of these years catches up to me. 

In 2020, 40% of the 43 million renter households in America were at risk of eviction. That works out to be 17 million households. In the winter of that year, as pandemic-induced eviction moratoriums neared expiry, experts estimated that 20-40 million eviction notices would be filed as soon as the moratoriums sunset. In “normal” times, an American is served an eviction every four minutes. An estimated 40 million evictions over the course of one winter, however, would work out to about 302 evictions per minute. In March, when all of this pandemic drama was still new, before we knew any of the terrible things we now know, I read that one could test their lung health by holding their breath for twenty seconds. Inhale. Hold: 100 people just lost their homes. Exhale. 

In those early pandemic months the room served the roles of sanctuary and sanatorium in equal measure. It was sanitary, well-scrubbed. The counters and the dresser tops and the nightstands alike were perpetually strewn with what might as well be a collector’s array of half-empty hand sanitizer bottles: ones that I got at work (before I became unemployed); at the food bank (before it closed due to lack of funds); and at the free, drive-up testing clinic I went to nearly every week for the salty pleasure of contact when the nurses rubbered hands grasped and lifted my chin. Three weeks after I was served, my left hand (So clean! So frequently washed and always subsequently lotioned!) started trembling. It never stopped. I was served notice despite all of my attentive energy assembling a home that might pass as the home of someone who knew how to inhabit one. I was learning how to take up space by covering surfaces, as though ownership of small and inconsequential items might make me good enough. Kava, milk thistle, CBD, fish oil, little amino acid capsules that are supposed to replenish my serotonin, unfinished courses of antidepressants, St. John’s Wort, beta blockers, benzos, a variety of B-numbered vitamins, chewable D gummies. Litter that accumulates, that tricked me into believing in a life that I wouldn’t have to start again from nothing. There was a wrinkled sleeve of hand cream that somebody’s grandmother had gifted me years ago when her son had brought me home after picking me up hitchhiking during the egg-yolk yellowed hours of late afternoon, and I had crashed family dinner with a face full of peeling skin that, years later, still smelled like funeral gardenias, wedged between tightly woven bundles of dried plants, valerian leaves, a bottle of expired Ibuprofen “that works on emotional pain, too,” as an ex-lover had told me while he ended us. An achy ethyl smell under everything makes me want to cry, or vomit. 

What of those hoarded bottles of 80% ethyl, the entire basket full of masks, the cocktail party of supplements and chemical pills I’m too proud to take and that wouldn’t make me feel better if I started? Where do we keep all the artifacts that let us feel like there is something we can control? Where would they go? Where would I go?

The first winter of the pandemic, at least 20 unsheltered people in Germany died. It was the nation’s deadliest winter on record for cold-stress and hypothermia. The driver that took me to Germany the year I was unsheltered in Western Europe was was Hungarian. In his country, at least 131 homeless people died in the capital city due to cold stress. 

Insufficient housing has non-lethal health outcomes, too. From the website Five Thirty-Eight: 

People who live in mobile homes tend to show patterns of more disturbed and less healthy sleep; apartments built after 1969 are associated with higher levels of depression, as are buildings where residents lack private yards...; the type of emergency housing a person lives in after a natural disaster is correlated with alcohol consumption patterns. 

There are reasons that humans evolved to thrive indoors and have created elaborate rituals and decorum around durational, place-based habitation, in life and in death. Even before the Natufians built the first permanent homesteads, humans had been building temporary shelters for at least 8,000 years (or 20,000 from today). The agricultural revolution that began after permanent inhabitation (in Mexico, in the Yangtze, and in the Natufian’s Levant) all spurred rapid genetic and sociocultural evolutions among humans -- but sleeping indoors did, too. Like migrating birds unable to rest mid-flight, or like whales who swim and breathe while asleep at sea, human brains practice hemispheric sleep the first night of resting in a new location. Half of the brain stays awake and alert. 

Living indoors is an ontological necessity. It also has the velocity of millennia of practice and, now, the teleologic importance of economics: Globally, interior design is valued at $151 billion annually. And indoor habitation has also made the earth a much larger place, literally. In Manhattan, for example, walk-ups and high rises are so numerous that their total area is triple the size of the total square feet of the island. In 2015, the New York Times reported that the global indoor biome is 247,000 square miles -- larger than the entire country of France. And growing. And yet the last time the United Nations tried to conduct a survey on global homelessness, they found that 1.6 billion humans lack adequate shelter despite the 12,000 years of time our species has had to figure out how to craft it. And then the evicted, the sleeping on couches, the patchwork interims quilted together as we cobble together false start after false start. None of this was ever yours. I wonder how many of us there are, teetering on the verge of houselessness without the heft of a label like ‘evicted’ to carry us in the narrative. 43 million renters nationwide and not one thing is theirs to keep: not the rattly windows, not the way the ceiling looks at 4 a.m., not the squeak of the third stair from the bottom. 

Archaeologists suspect that to preserve the body of the disabled shaman, Natufians put heavy slabs of limestone over her head, pelvis and arms. Maybe like a makeshift brine. Maybe to keep her staying. As centuries passed, the slabs eventually flattened the bones upon which they had been placed. That she was a shaman tells us that living inside has always been accompanied with a sort of mysticism, a sort of grandiose truth-seeking. It is the only locale where the divided halves of our brains can integrate in rest. As though the permanence of possession were a prerequisite.