This is my portrait of a Neolithic male inhabitant of the Middle Eastern Levant between 10,000 and 6500 BC. I based his facial features off a reconstruction of a skull from the site of Jericho which had been covered with a plaster “mask”.

Research on ancient DNA has shown that the Neolithic people of the Levantine region, who were among the world’s first farmers, would have descended from a mixture of the earlier Natufians on the one hand and Neolithic peoples of Anatolia (modern Turkey) on the other (the latter population also being the ancestors of the Neolithic farmers in Europe). Come the Bronze Age, the people in the Levant would in turn absorb migrants from further north and east, including some originating as far afield as modern Iran.