Free Republic

Mesopotamian climate change Geoscientists are increasingly exploring an interesting trend: Climate change has been affecting human society for thousands of years. At the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in December, one archaeologist presented research that suggests that climate change affected the way cultures developed and collapsed in the cradle of civilization — ancient Mesopotamia — more than 8,000 years ago. Archaeologists have found evidence for a mass migration from the more temperate northern Mesopotamia to the arid southern region around 6400 B.C. For the previous 1,000 years, people had been cultivating the arable land in northern Mesopotamia, using natural rainwater...

The earliest evidence of the use of olive oil in the country, and possibly the entire Middle East, was unearthed at an excavation site in the Lower Galilee, the Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday. The discovery was made after Dr. Ianir Milevski and Nimrod Getzov directed an archeological salvage excavation at Ein Tzipori between 2011 and 2013. The excavation led to research that indicated that olive oil was already being used in the country 8,000 years ago, during the 6th millennium BCE... These tests revealed that the pottery, dating to the Early Chalcolithic period, contained olive oil, the researchers concluded... Of...