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10,000-year-old house uncovered outside JerusalemI find this story especially fascinating because I have always been under the impression that permanent settlements did not exist prior to about 7,000 B.C.. So this is 3,000 years older than I always thought. Am I remembering wrong or does this seem to be way older than previous buildings?
Yes, I believe you are sort of right. I know there was a settlement at Tell es Sultan in Jericho which dates to 8000 B.C., but I'm not sure if any of the earliest structures are still standing (there is a standing tower there which dates to 7500 B.C.). A house that is 10,000 years old puts it on the border of the Mesolithic Era when the ice may have still been melting and people still nomadic, so it would be hard to build a permanent structure too early. The oldest known "temporary" house that I know of was one dating to about 16,0000-10,000 B.C. in the Ukraine, made out of mammoth bones.
According to the story they found this site while getting ready for a road expansion and it is collocated with a village/town that is a couple thousand years newer. It does not really say how they determined the age of 10,000 years though. I would think that if they are confident of the date that this would be pretty big news on some of the history and anthropology sites I lurk on and this story from Drudge is the first I have heard about it.
Yeah, I read through the story and didn't see where they talked about determining the date, either. There may be other sites in the East which are this age as well, but I am not as familiar with those. In any case, it could be a significant find – from the earliest stages of man's move toward permanent settlements.
