THE VILLAGE BY THE LAKE
Around 20,000 years ago, a fire started in a village on the shore of Lake Tiberius. Within minutes it had destroyed the brushwood huts and left six smoldering rings of charcoal where the village had been. If there were people living here at the time of the fire, they moved on; and within a few years, the rising water of the lake covered the site in a deep layer of silt.
In the autumn of 1989, after a drought that saw the water recede by some 10 meters, archaeologists found the remains of these houses in the exposed mud of the shore. Working quickly before the lake submerged the dig, they reconstructed a picture of life in one of the world’s first settled communities.
Towards the end of the last ice age, a band of nomadic hunter-gatherers arrived on the beach of the newly formed lake. Rather than moving on, they settled down to forage and fish and hunt, raising their children and burying their dead here at the water’s edge. They cooked on fire pits outside, knapped flint into sharp blades, and threw discarded shells and bones into a dumping ground.
One of the huts contained over 90,000 seeds, including many species of wild wheat and barley, as well as fruits which may have been dried in the sun and stored for the winter. There was also a heavy grinding stone set into the floor and surrounded by grain, as though someone – perhaps the mother of the family - had been making flour not long before the fire started
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