Shelters date to Stone Age

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http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/338646/title/Shelters_date_to_Stone_Age

The remains of a couple of nearly 20,000-year-old huts, excavated in a Jordanian desert basin, add to evidence that hunter-gatherers built long-term dwellings 10,000 years before farming villages debuted in the Middle East.

These new discoveries come from a time of social transition, when mobile hunter-gatherers hunkered down for months at a time in spots that featured rivers, lakes and plentiful game, say archaeologist Lisa Maher of the University of California, Berkeley and her colleagues. Discoveries in and around hut remnants at a Stone Age site called Kharaneh IV include hearths, animal bones and caches of pierced seashells and other apparently ritual items, Maher’s team reports in a paper published online February 15 in PLoS ONE.

Graves containing human skeletons were previously excavated beneath what have now been identified as hut floors covered by burned wood and shrubs that once served as walls.

Maher expects evidence of additional four- to five-person huts will turn up at the site, which is about the size of four U.S. football fields. Over a 1,000-year span, groups totaling between 50 and 100 people spent about half of each year at Kharaneh IV, she estimates.