Early farming, plaster traditions and southern Levantine ancestry east of the Jordan Valley.
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B was a formative age of village life in Jordan. Communities cultivated crops, kept animals and built increasingly substantial houses while maintaining elaborate rituals around ancestors and shared places. The reference belongs to this early agricultural landscape, before pottery became an everyday household technology. Its ancestry continues a deep Levantine history that began among the region’s earlier hunter-gatherers.
The PPNB occupied much of the ninth through seventh millennia BC across the Levant, with local sequences varying from place to place. Jordan’s settlements linked the Jordan Valley, central highlands and more arid country to the east. At Ain Ghazal, near modern Amman, an expanding community developed beside the Zarqa River. Cultivation and animal keeping supported this growth, while village life brought new demands for buildings, fuel and cooperation.
Stone-built homes and plaster surfaces required repeated investment in construction and maintenance. Ritual life was equally ambitious: Ain Ghazal is famous for large plaster human figures, smaller clay figurines and carefully treated human remains. Such practices suggest that belonging to a household or village involved shared memories and ceremonies as well as food production. These were societies developing their own institutions within settlements whose scale exceeded that of many earlier forager communities. These elaborate objects reveal the technical skill already present in early villages.
The earliest Levantine farmers carried substantial ancestry related to Natufian hunter-gatherers, alongside ancestry connected to other early Near Eastern populations. They remained genetically distinguishable from contemporary farmers in the Zagros and central Anatolia. This makes Jordanian PPNB an informative comparison for the southern branch of early farming ancestry. Later Levantine populations retained this background while mixing with groups connected to Anatolia, the Caucasus and Iran. The sequence explains why a Bronze Age Canaanite profile can preserve clear local roots while occupying a different position from an early Neolithic Jordanian one.
In the World Genetics modern G25 comparison, the closest non-self match for Jordan N PPNB is Egyptian Copt Sudan. Other nearby references include Egyptian Copt, Yemeni Arab Ma'rib, Yemeni Arab Al Jawf, and Yemeni Mehri Mahra. This gives the Jordan N PPNB profile its nearest modern genetic context inside the current reference database.
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The ancestral breakdown below loads the best-fitting World Genetics calculator for the Jordan N PPNB average. It should be read as a model of deep ancestry components, while the closest-match table is the better guide to which modern populations are most similar in G25 space.
The heatmap gives the Jordan N PPNB profile a geographic shape. Warmer areas mark regions where available modern reference populations sit closer to the Jordan N PPNB average, while cooler areas represent more distant matches.
The closest non-self match in this World Genetics comparison is Egyptian Copt Sudan. Other nearby references include Egyptian Copt, Yemeni Arab Ma'rib, Yemeni Arab Al Jawf, and Yemeni Mehri Mahra.
In the current modern G25 reference set, Egyptian Copt Sudan is the closest listed match to the Jordan N PPNB average after removing Jordan N PPNB itself from the table.
The heatmap shows where modern reference populations are closer or farther from the Jordan N PPNB G25 average, giving the closest-match results a geographic view.
Dates: approximate cultural or historical period.
