Cylinders of ancient mud drilled from the Carmel Coast in northern Israel have revealed how ancient human societies managed to adapt to turbulent climate changes thousands of years ago. Rather than collapse or move elsewhere, these communities faced adversity, including severe drought, according to a new study.

An international team of scientists, co-led by the University of Haifa’s Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies, decoded 4,000 years of environmental history in the ancient Mediterranean by drilling into the former Kebara wetland in northern Israel.

“People are problem solvers,” said Tom Levy, the paper’s senior author and co-director of the Center for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability (CCAS) at UC San Diego, which led the study along with the Recanati Institute. “They cope with environmental stress by developing new technologies and strategies.”

Their report, published last month in the Quaternary Science Reviews, found that “no direct correlation was identified between environmental changes and settlement reorganization from 8,000 to 4,000 years ago.”

“Ancient societies in the southern Levant did not simply collapse or abandon regions when climate conditions became drier,” Gilad Shtienberg, the paper’s first author, told The Times of Israel. “Instead, they adapted in creative ways.”

Shtienberg is a research scholar with the CCAS and the anthropology department.

“During the Neolithic period, many communities were concentrated near reliable freshwater sources in the more humid northern Negev and coastal plain,” said Shtienberg. “Later, during the Chalcolithic period, populations expanded into the more semi-arid Beersheba valley.”

“Rather than retreat from these harsher conditions, communities developed new strategies to survive,” he said, adding that........

© The Times of Israel