Some 15,000 years ago, the Carmel plain in northern Israel was covered in lakes and marshes, attracting a high variety of waterfowl, much of which ended up on the tables of the region’s inhabitants, a new study published last week in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology has found.

Coming from the United Kingdom, the paper’s lead author Dr. Linda Amos said she has always enjoyed a roasted turkey for the winter holidays. This festive tradition helped her connect with the habits of those ancient hunter-gatherers whose practices allowed the researchers to learn more about the natural environment of the region.

“Every winter, they ate ducks,” Amos from the University of Haifa and Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel, Germany, told The Times of Israel over a phone interview. “It resonates with me that in that season, they would know this delicious bird came back. I can imagine them on a foggy morning, getting up, going out, and hunting ducks, as they had heard they had arrived.”

Prof. Mina Weinstein-Evron and Prof. Reuven Yeshurun from the University of Haifa also authored the study, which marks the first time scholars have focused on bird bones uncovered in the Natufian layers at the el-Wad Cave terrace, analyzing hundreds of them.

The Natufians were a hunter-gatherer population that lived in the region at the very end of the Paleolithic period (approximately 15,000 to 11,700 years ago) and are considered a critical link between the last nomadic hunter-gatherers and the first sedentary farmers in the Neolithic, as the Natufians resided in permanent villages. The site was dated through radiocarbon........

© The Times of Israel