Galilee Drought Uncovers Oldest Village In The World

Sunday Times (UK) ^ | 9-23-2001 | Dina Shiloh

[blam]

September 23 2001 MIDDLE EAST

Galilee drought uncovers oldest village in the world

Dina Shiloh Tel Aviv

ISRAELI archeologists have found what could be the world's oldest village on the dried-out bed of the Sea of Galilee. The settlement, dating back 20,000 years, came to light in one of the worst droughts in recent years.

Thousands of items including huts, tools and fireplaces found at Ohalo, on the southwestern shore, give a unique insight into the semi-nomadic people who lived there towards the end of the early Stone Age.

"We found what every researcher dreams of finding," said Dani Nadel, who leads the Haifa University excavation team, "items used in everyday life, and small artefacts that tell us things we never even dreamed about in regard to the technology, society and environment of these people."

The items are in almost perfect condition because the water that covered them prevented decay. Nadel said the large quantities of seeds and other organic materials meant carbon-14 testing could be used to date them accurately.

"Usually dwellings from this period are not preserved, and we do not know how many they were, where they stood, the number, size, and orientation of their fireplaces, or how the living area was arranged," he said. "Here we found the most ancient huts in the world."

The brush huts - less than 2ft apart - were made with branches of oak and tamarisk trees, with the cracks stuffed with shrubs and grasses.

"These nomads ate mostly fish and fruit," Nadel said. "We are talking about 9,000 years before the beginning of agriculture, before the domestication of animals or plants. But we did find hundreds of thousands of fish bones, so they were fishermen. They also knew how to hunt water fowl, ravens, birds of prey, and even animals like the gazelle, fallow deer, fox, hare and turtle."

The team also found the skeleton of a man. Aged about 40 when he died and just over 5ft tall, he had his hands folded across his chest. Only one other skeleton from this period has been discovered in Israel.

Haifa University intends to display some of the treasures from Ohalo next year. The excavation ended last month and the team has left plenty of material for other archeologists to find when scientific techniques have become more developed.

"The finds unearthed by our team could serve as research material for each and every one of us until we retire," Nadel said. "But we should leave future archeologists things to discover, too."

[Gargantua]

And if that doesn't answer your question, read this:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2001/0321acc_beta_decay.asp

[texlok]

>The finding of the village is believeable, but finding a human skelton is not.....

So if the village wasn't built by humans, who was it? The Smurfs? A reverse of Planet of the Apes?

All kidding aside, let's hope the global warming fanatics don't latch onto this one as a sign that global warming exists (Although it would be a poor argument against global warming since it's taken 20,000 years to uncover the village, and had it been uncovered and recovered at any point I'm sure there wouldn't be much left and global warming is supposed to have been going on for a while).

[Ciexyz]

Cool! Thanks for posting this article.

[dbbeebs]

yet its ability to determine that something is millions of years old goes unquestioned in the scientific community at large.

Right. Carbon 14 dating is only good out to 50,000 years or so. Due to the halflife, don't you know?

[rface]

Ah, but my prediction came true!

So it did! spit on someone and they will respond.... Your manners are bad. Keep your spit in your mouth. I don't like it on me, and I am sure that your spit that drips off of other religous FReepers don't think highly of it either.

I used to have a higher opinion of Vermonters. You must be a flatlander. Go figure.

Ashland, Missouri

[Jolly Rodgers]

BTW are the eco-terrorists on GWs list?

Well, he did say he would target those with a global reach, and they have been traveling to foreign countries to protest trade conferences...

I really don't think he'll want to have the US labeled as an exporter of terrorism while he's attacking other countries for that self-same thing. I think it might be high time to start adding the environmental and anti-trade organizations to the list of financially embargoed groups.

[Jolly Rodgers]

It assumes that production and decay of C14 are in equilibrium. They are not. The result is that the older an object actually is, its C-14 date will make it appear to be much older. Of course, that's assuming the rate of production has remained constant. The discrepancy between the rates of production and decay were at first just assumed to have been experimental error because it was previously assumed that they would have to have already been in equilibrium. As I recall, the difference was something between 10 and 20%, though it's been a while since I read the paper.

The snippets I posted indicated that the calibrations from independent sources show that the error was in the opposite direction. Items dated prior to calibration for the changes in C-14 rates of absorption are much too young.

[Da_Shrimp]

Actually, it refers to the Earth's decaying magnetic field, and the fact that this points to an Earth roughly 10,000 years old.

Ah, Thomas G. Barnes 1973 ICR technical monograph? An old chestnut... I'm surprised that YECs are still using it! One of the main reasons for rejecting the theory is that the earth's magnetic field periodically reverses itself (asrecorded in sea floor sedments), thus of course rendering any unidirectional extrapolation on field strength useless.

Here's a useful discussion on it.

By the way, here's how to make links:

<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/magfields.html">Click here</a>

Or, if you want to make the page open in a new window:

<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/magfields.html" target="_blank">Click here</a>

[Straight Vermonter]

Nope born and raised here. You know what I am a religious person too. That doesn't change the fact that many here take even the slihtest opportunity to start yet another creationism vs evolution thread. You may think that we do not have enough threads on the issue I do not.

[American Preservative]

Hope the Trans-Arabians/Muslims don't find out about this ancient village - you know how "tolerant" they are about other people's lives, and, preserving others' archeological sites/treasures.

[blam]

"you know how "tolerant" they are about other people's lives, and, preserving others' archeological sites/treasures."

You mean like 1600 year old Buddha statues.

[American Preservative]

Exactly! And, in Israel - Rachel's Tomb, sites in Jericho, Hebron, Jerusalem...the list goes on and on...

[alaskanfan]

This site has a good discussion of some methods of determining the age of the Earth.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html

[Thumper1960]

No more than 100 years. Those who existed before my "grandparents" are stories told by the oldsters to make sense of spontaneous creation.

;-)

[Da_Shrimp]

Wow!

You can, of course, produce all the geological evidence to support these ideas?

[csvset]

Thanks.

[aruanan]

The snippets I posted indicated that the calibrations from independent sources show that the error was in the opposite direction. Items dated prior to calibration for the changes in C-14 rates of absorption are much too young.

I'm not talking about rates of absorption but rates of production versus rates of decay. If the rate of production has not (for whatever reason) reached equilibrium with rate of decay, then something from an earlier period will have a smaller initial amount of C14 than expected. This will make it look a lot older than it actually is. For that matter, if there were a time with a greater rate of C14 production than seen at present, a plant (or animal via the plants it has eaten, etc.) will have a larger than expected initial complement of C14 and appear much younger than it actually is. There are also plants which selectively retain different ratios of carbon isotopes (corn and some other grasses). Animals that eat more of these plants have a different ratio of C14 to C13 than animals that do not and so have an different apparent C14 age.

[Jolly Rodgers]

The issues you raise are valid, and they are the reason why the C-14 dating performed in the 50's and 60's has been discarded. However, the process of calibration from independent sources accounts for the variability and makes more recent dating trustworthy.

[BlueLancer]

"If it took this drought to uncover this village, wonder what it was like there when it was built?"

Jeez, I wouldn't have thought that the industrial pollution in those days would have been enough to trigger the type of global warming they must have had then!

8')