by Isabel Kershner
Flint stones that indicate prehistoric recycling were found in Qesem Cave and examined at Tel Aviv University.
For years, archaeologists have been diligently digging
their way through prehistoric layers of time, unearthing the secrets of
Qesem Cave.
Located
just outside Tel Aviv and discovered by accident during a road
construction project in 2000, the cave most recently offered up insights
into life hundreds of thousands of years ago that provide a sobering
counterpoint to at least one aspect of modern life.
It seems that back in the day, early inhabitants of the area were all about recycling — a potential lesson for today’s Israel.
“Recycling
was a way of life,” said Ran Barkai, an associate professor in the
department of archaeology and ancient Near Eastern civilizations at Tel
Aviv University who, together with Prof. Avi Gopher, his teacher, has
researched Qesem Cave since its discovery. “It was part of human
evolution and human nature.”
“At some point,” he added, “they taught us to forget that.”
After
14 years, archaeologists have penetrated about 32 feet below what was
the original ceiling. Along the way, they found thousands of recycled
tools in the cave, including bone hammers and reworked flint stones.
With aged, glossy surfaces broken by newer, rougher razor edges, the
flint tools were part of a vast collection of knives apparently used for
butchering, cleaning animal hides and cutting vegetable matter. Some of
the blades are as sharp as a scalpel and as small as a thumbnail.
Prof. Ran Barkai has
researched the Qesem Cave since its discovery in 2000.
Flint stones that
indicate prehistoric recycling were found in the cave and examined at
Tel Aviv University.
Recycling
came naturally to these early humans, a habit largely neglected in
modern-day Israel, where a current television public awareness campaign
features children in superhero outfits pilfering plastic bottles from
under their parents’ noses for recycling.
Amir
Peretz, the minister of environmental protection until last month, was
about to push through draft legislation to phase out the use of plastic
bags at Israeli supermarkets. But he resigned, citing his opposition to
the 2015 draft state budget and the lack of peace negotiations with the Palestinians, and his initiative was shelved.
At
the cave site, there is evidence that prehistoric humans were not
always so thrifty, but that the behavior evolved. Life in the region
dates back at least 1.5 million years, but Professor Barkai said that a
dramatic change had occurred here 400,000 years ago. He said that for
some unknown reason the elephants that had served as a main food source
apparently disappeared, prompting a change of menu and lifestyle for the
inhabitants of Qesem Cave, near the town of Rosh Haayin.
In
the quest for survival, Israeli archaeologists say, the cave dwellers
here began hunting fallow deer instead of elephants. At the same time,
they discovered the delights of a hot, home-cooked meal — and apparently
invented the barbecue.
These
early humans had the intelligence to squeeze the maximum out of every
product. After cooking the meat, then smashing the bones to extract the
marrow, Professor Barkai said, “they used the bone fragments to create
tools with which to butcher the next deer.”
“They closed a circle,” he said.
The
cave is just 7.5 miles east from the bustling center of Tel Aviv, the
fast moving metropolis on the Mediterranean. The cave was exposed by
chance when road builders widening the highway to the West Bank
settlement of Ariel blasted a hillside, collapsing the cave’s ceiling.
Another archaeologist who happened to be nearby, guarding his own cave,
spotted chunks of rock packed with bones and flint and immediately
realized that the site was prehistoric.
The road was diverted to skirt the cave, but to this day, the primeval find is tested by the trucks hurtling by.
The
cave now sits under a canopy a few footsteps up a path off the
four-lane highway. Ladders and narrow planks connect the various levels
of the site that have been exposed. There is no digging in the winter,
and many of the discoveries have been removed and taken to laboratories
or university storerooms. But flint and bone fragments remain lodged in
every cranny of the cave’s beige earth.
The
cave caused a bit of a stir in 2010, when it was reported that several
teeth found there had provided evidence for the existence of Homo
sapiens, or modern humans, 200,000 years earlier than in Africa, and
earlier than in anywhere else in the world.
By
now, 13 early human teeth have been found, and Professor Barkai said
the inhabitants might have been a kind of missing link — more advanced
than Homo erectus and precursors of Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals.
The
latest research to emerge from the cave was the insight into recycling
among the Stone Age innovators, who lived here on and off from about
400,000 to 200,000 years ago.
That
phenomenon was recently documented in a series of articles that the Tel
Aviv professors wrote with other experts for the Elsevier Quaternary
International academic journal, with titles like “Recycling Bones in the
Middle Pleistocene: Some Reflections From Gran Dolina TD10-1 (Spain),
Bolomor Cave (Spain) and Qesem Cave (Israel),” and “The Function of
Recycled Lithic Items at Late Lower Paleolithic Qesem Cave, Israel: An
Overview of the Use-Wear Data.”
The
early humans had to adapt to their changing environment — perhaps
another lesson for the modern world. They developed an independent,
local culture, Professor Barkai said, that stretched across the
territory that now includes Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
The
hunters needed to become more discerning, agile and efficient. On
average, 80 deer were needed to make up the food provided by one
elephant. The cave dwellers also gathered small fruit and nuts and
collected wood for fires. This area was a kind of Eden, with natural
springs and flint in abundance.
They
began crafting their sharp tools from flint, according to experts,
racing ahead of their time and their human contemporaries in Europe and
Africa.
“This was the high technology of the ancient man,” Professor Barkai said.
In
a patch that once served as a hearth, layers of hardened ash date back
300,000 years. Here the earth is packed with bone fragments, including a
horse’s jaw with two front teeth. Though sporadic use of fire existed
much earlier, Qesem Cave has been established as the site with the
earliest evidence of the systematic use of fire for roasting meat on a
daily, domestic basis — “like when we turn on the gas stove,” as
Professor Barkai put it. The cave dwellers’ ancestors probably ate their
elephants raw.
The
cave was organized like a house, he said, with different areas serving
as a kitchen, a workshop and an area where children appeared to have
practiced making flint tools of their own. The hearth also appears to
have served as a kind of central campfire.
Professor
Barkai said that evidence of some of the same behavior, technologies
and methods had been found as far away as Syria and that there must have
been some kind of communication between the early humans in the region.
“I don’t know how,” the professor says. “There was no Wi-Fi, but they knew each other.”
