The Natufian grows out of a toolkit carried north from Egypt

Around the middle of the fourteenth millennium BCE the Mushabian culture became established in Sinai and the Negev, carrying tools and toolmaking techniques characteristic of the late Afian of Egypt and the cultures that followed it there. The archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef argued that the Mushabian merged with the Geometric Kebaran, a local Levantine tradition, and that the merger produced the Natufian around 13,000 BCE. The Natufian lasted until the middle of the tenth millennium BCE, when farming began in the Middle East, and its makers are generally taken to be the cultural forebears of the early Semitic speakers. Follow that chain backwards. Grain harvesting in the Ethiopian highlands before 16,000 BCE, the Afian in Egypt by 15,000 BCE, the Mushabian in Sinai, the Natufian in the Levant, then the first farming villages of the Middle East. Every step runs south to north. The culture textbooks treat as the source of the Neolithic has an African grandparent.