Ruins of 7,000-year-old city found in Egypt oasis

[TechBear_Seattle]

Ruins of 7,000-year-old city found in Egypt oasis

CAIRO (AFP) - A team of US archaeologists has discovered the ruins of a city dating back to the period of the first farmers 7,000 years ago in Egypt's Fayyum oasis, the supreme council of antiquities said on Tuesday.

"An electromagnetic survey revealed the existence in the Karanis region of a network of walls and roads similar to those constructed during the Greco-Roman period," the council's chief Zahi Hawwas said.

The remnants of the city are "still buried beneath the sand and the details of this discovery will be revealed in due course," Hawwas said.

...

The remains date back to the Neolithic period between 5,200 and 4,500 BC.

:wow:

The full article can be read at http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080129/wl_mideast_afp/egyptarchaeology

[Rock_Garden]

1. Wow! Thank you, TechBear.

[crikkett]

2. WOW!

Chinese culture is thought to be 5,000 years old.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Very cool! I just got done reading about this period in Reader's book ...

"Africa: Biography of a Continent". Apparently, discoveries in African archaeology in the last few decades have been slow to work their way into public consciousness (surprise -- duhh). I hope at least the encyclopedias are being updated. Too much to ask that schoolbooks experience the same.

[applegrove]

4. I love this stuff.

[gtar100]

5. The first farmers 7,000 years ago?

Conservative estimates are that modern humans have been around about 200,000 years but Homo Sapiens and relatives have been around for millions of years. I have only my BS meter to see that the number 7,000 is small in such scales and just wonder what happened to at least 193,000 years of history in which 7,000 years occurred an additional 28 and a half times. So little is said about human culture prior to about 10,000 years ago. Like we were all knuckle-dragging cave men before that. We really aren't so new. The first farmers only 7,000 years ago? Please. We evolved on this planet and have been part and parcel of it for millions of years in various forms with a mind, a heart, our eyes, our hands, and 24 hour days to pass through moment by moment. We didn't evolve, for example, language in all its subtleties by scratching our underarms, walking around clubbing dinosaurs, and grunting at each other. I suspect we made rather interesting sounds and came to discuss rather interesting and mundane subjects for a very, very long time. So I would revise the article's sentence to read "the earliest known farmers we have found to date". Indicating otherwise suppresses curiosity and invites dogma into a mind that should remain open and inquisitive.

/end rant

[TechBear_Seattle]

7. You may wish to learn something about Egyptian history

Very little is known about Egyptian civilization before the development of writing during the proto-Dynastic period, which began around 3100 BCE. Agriculture is known to have existed in Egypt as long as 13,000 years ago, but the earliest example of an agriculturally based community is Predynastic, dating to about 3800 BCE. This new find pushes that date back a thousand years.

When it was an active city, the Sahara had not yet reached that far east and the environment would have been savannah; this find provides a glimpse into what life might have been like. It also exhibits architecture and urban planning that was still in use by Hellenic and Latin cultures 5000 years latter, pushing back the point where such techniques were first developped. And lastly, the Neolithic period in Egypt has largely been lost, thanks to the spread of the desert and millennia of occupation in the areas that remained after desertification, giving this discovery considerable worth.

[rayofreason]

8. The earliest evidence for farming...

...is about 11,000 years ago. Why not earlier? Or later for that matter. This is one of the biggest questions in archeology. Certainly you need a reason to farm (such as high population density that makes the hunter/gatherer life less fruitful) as well as the available crops (read "Gun, Germ, and Steel" for a detailed exposition of this point). Regardless, the evidence stands -near eastern agriculture was the first, about 9000 BCE.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. The record is always incomplete -- that's kind of taken for granted.

Availability of evidence is largely a matter of chance -- survival of the evidence is largely a matter of environment at that location. Deserts are great for preserving archaeological evidence, but not for farming, so early evidence of farming depends on farmland being transformed into deserts before the evidence can decay. This happened in large parts of the Middle East, which is partly why there is more evidence there (the other big reason being building in stone).

Of course, it's also taken for granted that 'development' implies human abilities increased over time and mostly were not forgotten, so that knowledge of X at some point in time implies "and thereafter", but arguing knowledge of X at an earlier time demands evidence from that time.

I did recently read of some evidence of farming, at a kind of minimal level, in Africa 45,000 yrs ago (ybp). But there's a big gap in the record after that.

[krispos42]

6. An obvious plant by Satan to test the believers!

Just like the fake dinosaur bones. And "American Idol".

[Markgalantier]

10. They should start digging

can't wait to see the ruins.