What People Ate in the World's Oldest Village

Karahan Tepe is an archaeological site near Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, and has been dated back to between 10,000 and 9500 BCE. That would make it the oldest known village on earth. Of course, "known" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, since earlier villages built with wood or other organic material could have vanished completely. Karahan Tepe was built of stone. 

The common understanding of the birth of civilization is that nomadic people settled down in permanent communities in order to grow grain crops. But new findings from Karahan Tepe reveal what the residents ate, and it was mostly gazelle meat and wild legumes, not grains. Such a diet, while monotonous, would provide the protein required for building the stone walls, monuments, and carvings found on the site. This 12,000-year old community may have delved into agriculture of some sort, but it mainly relied on hunting and gathering while its people built something truly lasting. Read about Karahan Tepe and what we've learned from it at the Debrief. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Campels)