Negev Desert’s Ancient Site Tells Story About Humans, Neanderthals Coexistence

Conny Waters – MessageToEagle.com – The Boker Tachtit archaeological excavation site, in Israel’s central Negev desert, holds clues to one of the most important events in human history: the spread of modern humans, Homo sapiens, from Africa into Eurasia, and the subsequent demise of Neanderthal populations in the region.

View of the Boker Tachtit excavation site. Circled: a group of unearthed flint stone artifacts; Flint point representative of the Upper Paleolithic in Boker Tachtit. Photo: Clara Amit, Israel Antiquities Authority

Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Max Planck Society, led by Prof. Elisabetta Boaretto, together with Dr. Omry Barzilai of the Israel Antiquities Authority, returned to Boker Tachtit nearly forty years after it was first excavated.

Using advanced sampling and dating methods, they offer a new chronological framework for this important chapter in our anthropological evolution, which suggests that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were far from strangers.

According to the “recent African origin” theory, Homo sapiens originated in Africa as early as 270,000 years ago and at different times took either the northern route to Eurasia, passing through the Levant, or several possible southern routes to remote corners of Asia and even Oceania – reaching as far as Australia by land. Boker Tachtit, located in the Wadi Zin basin, in what today is the Ein Avdat National Park, is considered a key site for tracing this migration. It is a major site in the Levant for documenting an important period in humankind’s prehistory: the transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic – from a predominantly Neanderthal prehistorical culture to the beginning of modern humans’ reign.

This transition was marked by technological innovations such as blade production and the introduction of standardized tools made from bones and antlers.

Wadi Zin basin in the Ein Avdat National Park. Star indicating the location of Boker Tachtit. Image source

American archaeologist Anthony Marks, who first excavated and published his analysis of Boker Tachtit in the early 1980s, defines the site as a transitional industry from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic and, based on a single radiocarbon date, concluded that it dates to 47,000 years ago. The problem was, however, that additional dates obtained from the site, some reaching as late as 34,000 years ago, made the timing of the transition very problematic.

“If we are to follow this timeline, then the transitional period could have lasted more than 10,000 years, and yet artifacts excavated from northern sites in Israel, Lebanon and even Turkey suggest that the transition occurred much faster,” says Boaretto, who heads D-REAMS (The Dangoor Research Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory )at the Weizmann Institute, which specializes in advanced archaeological dating methods.

“Marks managed to date only a few specimens from Boker Tachtit, owing to the limitations of radiocarbon dating then, and the range of his proposed dates is not consistent with evidence gathered from other – old and new – excavation sites in the region,” Boaretto says. “Radiocarbon dating, the method that he used in his study, has evolved tremendously since his time.”

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Written by Conny Waters – MessageToEagle.com – AncientPages.com Staff Writer