Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known farming village in Egypt, a 7,000-year-old site whose residents grew wheat and barley and raised sheep, goats and pigs.
Farming probably occurred much earlier in Egypt, experts agree, but those first settlements most likely would have been along the banks of the Nile River and would have been obliterated by the periodic flooding and course changes of the river.
The new discovery, southwest of Cairo, was protected from such damage.
“This area is giving us a snapshot of what life was like” in Egypt more than 1,000 years before the Pharaonic and pyramid-building era began, said archaeobotanist Melinda Zeder of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the research. “We have a much richer record than anyone could have guessed.”
