The Mystery Of The 9,000 Year Old Village Hidden Under The Sea | The Mystery Of Atlit-Yam | Timeline

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] [Music] the coast of the Levant hides secrets that go back to the dawn of mankind most of our distant ancestors traveled through the coastal plain at the foot of the Carmel range as our species Homo sapiens gradually took to the four corners of the world this lateral pathway between Africa and Asia then Europe has seen more cultures more varied living conditions and more upheavals than any other region in the world here to travel back in time one only has to dig [Music] narrations of humans have left traces of their passage from crude Flint axes to objects more elaborate and more precious foreign yet the real Treasures of the region aren't to be found underground but underwater we are 10 kilometers south of Haifa Israel lying offshore the little town of athlete research vessel Medics is about drop anchor at the foot of an impregnable Fortress built by the Knights Templars itself erected on the foundations of a more ancient Phoenician Harbor the mystery of athletes starts with the discovery of an unusual mound of stone half a kilometer from the shore under 10 meters of water the discoverer Dr ehut khalili is an archaeologist and an accomplished diver [Music] [Music] his uncanny Sixth Sense has always helped him to discern revealing signs of a find in the strange Universe of marine landscapes but Dr Galilei doesn't yet suspect that he is about to make the discovery of his lifetime [Music] first of all there was the invention of the Aquaman then I was born for me it is a two important events [Music] I felt I started as a smoker diver I started to I join my father in the association foreign and very soon I realized that I wanted to explore the sea I wanted to dive and to find things that nobody had ever thought before yeah very very rare places online well no you can go and you know that you are the first one in the sea anywhere you go you are the first to be there if you love history then you will love history hit our extensive library of documentary features everything from the ancient origins of our earliest ancestors to the daring mission to sink the bismar history hit has hundreds of exclusive documentaries with unrivaled access to the world's best historians we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a free trial and timeline fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code timeline at checkout first of all as a boy who was looking for coins and artifacts or the passion of collection and fighting and then as a researcher wanted to know the background and the story Beyond these artifacts not only to put these nice artifacts on the television and work done but tell you where did they come from how they were done who were the Mariners who were the fishermen what technologies they use all these questions we can answer by studying these signs that we found from the sea scores of relics have been retrieved by Dr Galilei or his colleagues and curse from all eras chariot wheels ingots cannonballs but they came mostly from the endless chain of wreckages that plagued the sailors over the centuries on this Coast the lack of natural Harbors makes the winter Westerly winds ruthless after every stop new areas are exposed and new delicious Alpha the main idea is to wait for the sea to do the job of Excavating [Music] the day of the discovery one of those big storms had partly exposed the strange Rocky formation from the sand our scientific treasure hunter knew immediately that this was no wreck who could have had the motivation and means to go and build something there so deep under the sea Phoenicians Romans Templars Arabs this question intrigued Dr Galilei years earlier in the same area he had helped to retrieve the ram of a war galley a half ton bronze behemoth it's had an important Trading Post in athletes using the eyelid close to the peninsula so their boats could land with sufficient draft [Music] these Merchants were four-sided Mariners and Savvy Builders but none of their structures had been found so far from the shore the means and determination of Templars could more easily account for such a feat but to what end [Music] during the Crusades Chateau Pelham was an imposing Fortress with many lines of defense this Castle was so well protected that it was never taken when the knights deserted the Levant it is said that weeks went by before the Muslims realized that the place was empty [Music] the first dig by Galilei and his team reveals quite a different story a different prehistory shall we say the site predates the Iron Age the Bronze Age or even the pottery age this is Stone Age Way Beyond 6 000 years [Music] first of all we came to a Thomas or a towel of about 80 centimeter High build of undressed stones without cement of course a lion one near the other in circles and then when we removed it and start to excavate We Came Upon A well which is constructed from very sophisticated way and the same as well that we built today stone age is a general term that encompasses millions of years of evolution from cavemen to civilization the end of this long pre-history is marked by a deep Revolution the Neolithic the new stone age Under 12 meters of salt water Dr galilei's Discovery appears to be the most ancient submerged Neolithic site ever found at all Dr Israel hershkovitz a medical doctor specializing in prehistoric pathology was convinced that the Stone Mound would turn out to be a burial place he was wrong about the mound but his hopes wouldn't be dashed for long [Music] [Music] the best moment in Atlanta was when we activated the first human skeleton which was an outstanding experience I mean that we knew that there is probably there is a burial pit over there and we start moving the clay slowly slowly we expose the skull and then we expose the rest of the skeleton but interestingly once we expose the full skull the skull had a huge hole you know at the center probably a post-mortem damage to the skull and a fish came out of it you know out of the skull the very fishing idea if you take a modern skull the people of atletium would look similar to present-day 11 in population they will look more or less the same as you and I [Music] for only the tip of the iceberg no one could have expected what was to follow now you see the village is 40 000 square meters now this is also covered everything is covered all this is covered by sin this information was gathered after 25 years of exposure sure it's like as you say it's like a jigsaw puzzle the Deep layer of sand along the coastline is always on the move this often allows for a very short exploration window it took over 25 years of work before one of the finest jewels of prehistory gave up all of its secrets the site was called atlet yam Athlete on the sea in Hebrew before these images were shot almost no one outside A specialized scientific Community was aware of the importance or even the existence of the site water Expeditions require much more resources than digging on firm ground the preparation is a logistical puzzle on its own for each Mission a small village has to be erected on the beach to accommodate the researchers the divers and their equipment the ascent of mankind implies the whole world besides Israeli researchers scientists convert here from Germany Scotland Ireland France Canada Scandinavia or Bulgaria the current mission was initiated by the European Splash Coast program dedicated to the study of Continental shelves for the major part of prehistory during the last Ice Age Continental shelves everywhere were above water level Mankind's first roads were never far from coastlines so up to 85 percent of all the earliest archaeological sites are now located under the sea the site is located about 400 meters offshore here to the West behind this van with the boat a little about 200 meters South [Music] in the time of atli young the levantine coastal plains stretched up to a kilometer further west towards the sea people okay I'm really excited about my first dive I'm not sure what to expect how warm it is and the visibility or condition of the remains down there so I'm quite nervous it's my first Marine archeology dive we are now in the North Bay of athlete we are going to die in the submerged neurithic settlement at lithium it is a 9 000 year old settlement from the pre-protein oriented period and at that period people didn't have Pottery of course they didn't have metal they didn't know how to write but they produced all kind of tools from both from Stone and this is actually what we found underwater archeology relative to sort of traditional land archeology it is a new field like the work that Ehud galili and his team have produced here at lithium has really helped the field of submerged by history to be recognized on an international level and I think it's only going to expand foreign [Music] and it's just a question of getting a very large aluminum pipe unbalanced sort of the head where the valve is and it's pretty heavy and so they said right we're gonna we're gonna go down you take this end I got this and we'll go down together it gives me the super heavy end and I went right down to the bottom and I thought yeah that was funny foreign so I was pretty awkward initially but then we got down uh they set up the basically the dredge line a couple of buoys to keep it sort of buoyant it's actually a nice setup and then um that took a while and it's our first working dive together so there's a bit of communication it's like your first day on any job you have to figure out who you're working with and how you're working together and all of that except you can't talk so you're trying to you do this and you watch me and all that stuff and by the end of the diet we had it foreign over the years Dr galilei's teams have contributed to the fine-tuning of reliable equipment to move and sieve through the thousands of cubic meters of sand that covered the ruins diving with a hood is like diving with someone who has the experience of a 60 year old and the energy of a 25 year old so archeology is the unavoidable systematic destruction of evidence archaeologists are entitled to one single attempt the members are forced to work slowly with extra caution and thirdness looking for the smallest Clues foreign depth of the layer soil composition and even the relative position of remains are essential to recreate the past [Music] no one knows under which Stone an archaeological find is hiding [Music] the Forty thousand square meters of athlete yam are an archaeological mine architecture technology lifestyle wherever they dig Dr galilei's research teams discover new clues about this year-round sedentary site twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids the well-discovered by Galilei is the most ancient example of this type of construction ever found [Music] this first Well turns out to be an archaeologist's dream come true instead of the expected sand and rocks that should have filled it scores of carved objects animal remains and other man-made items were found giving a fair Chronicle of the daily life of the 30 odd families that used to live here all year round [Music] for archaeologists all of athlete yam artifacts are deemed in situ finds objects found in context where they were abandoned nine thousand years ago foreign [Music] Pebble it looks like you have the cortex here and we have something yeah definitely yeah these are flakes this one is slightly loaded but they're all man-made let's say that this is a big core of Flint like this this is a call so you prepare you make some preparation and then one strike thick and you have the blade too much in the sole sector dedicated to Flint tool making a sample of 8755 artifacts has been identified from Flint flakes to functional tools these are artifacts that we found in atletium it is only a random collection to just to demonstrate the nature of the artifacts that we have here this for example is a beef facial you have all the surface polished with pleasure flakes it takes a lot of skill and professional Flint Napper to do this maybe every in any 1000 people there is only one with specialist for this and this knowledge is was transferred from generation to generation and it is very very sophisticated very very Prestige too they were hell ahead they have two kind of arrowheads and these are biblos these are biblos you can see the arrowheads out nice they are work perfect they were half dead of course and they were used for hunting and these I'll be patient access and they were used for woodwork used for cutting Woods cutting trees and maybe producing both who knows because we know that these people have the capability of selling in the sea because the type of fish that we discover some of them are deep sea and deep sea fish and they require a knowledge in selling so they probably had both but we didn't find the boat because organic material is not always for sale the waterproofing effect of clay has helped the archaeologists in many ways fragile remains such as fish bones are abundant over 6 000 fish remains have been lifted from the bottom allowing for very detailed interpretations with its characteristic retractile dorsal spine Triggerfish is the most common species found in athletium the average size of the specimen analyzed matches the expected type of catch using a net [Music] they add the add the chips they were fishermen they were good fishermen we found here a lot of fisherman equipment and also needles which they probably saw the necks and they live on the fishing they live by the sea you know there are no evidence for boat whatsoever you know how can you tell from the human from the pound that the people were engaged in seafaring you know that they were really using boats you know and whether they were able or capable of reaching the island of disciples for example and there are specific diseases you know especially in the vertebral column that tells you the posterior part of the vertebra the neural Arch so the there is enough evidence in in the skeleton to tell you almost everything about the people who were living at lithium typical wear on specific vertebraes and larger muscle attachments on high limb bones are compatible with long hours paddling in a boat you see if you take is mandible for example you see here we have Motors one of the side of the crown is totally eroded this specific teeth was heavily treated by some cultural Behavior because we know that people were using their teeth not just to process the food but actually to prepare a fishnet for examples or to prepare baskets for example but what you call cultural attraction is very different from what you call Food attrition Century cultural attrition of teeth used to weave fibers or tan skins could still be seen in some ethnic groups to weave their nests fishermen of athlete yam relied on fiber these types of remains are amongst the most difficult for an archaeologist to establish but researchers in athletia were lucky enough to find carbonized plant fibers still clearly identifiable after 9 000 years [Music] flax fiber for instance could be used for ropes Nets and maybe even clothing [Music] such organic remains as well as charcoal or bones can be used to obtain precise data that provides further details on the evolution of ancient settlements the clock used here is an unstable form of carbon that decays an unknown and regular pattern carbon 14. this is the bone very well preserved of a small mammal probably a mouse so this sticking have to be done very carefully and you get a lot of information apart from hand collecting material from the surface of the site and Excavating inside the wells and in that sediment we found animal bones which we wouldn't have collected from the sea floor without the dredger it's one of the first sites where we have almost the full complement of domestic animals which means sheep goat cattle Pig so that we can see within the site the complete if you like development of domestic animals beginning with animals that are wild and hunted through to animals that are fully domesticated so we have one of the more impressive pieces which is a horn core a horn of a cattle and this is probably a wild uh cattle what we call an orac so this is from before animals were domesticated [Music] also from the surface of the site our own cause of goats and this would have been a wild goat or a very very primitive goat we can compare it here and you can see that the horn core is very straight and leaves the skull right above the front of the the eyes as opposed to a domestic goat you can see that the horn cores go backwards and they also have a Twist so what we're dealing here is really one of the earliest points in the domestication of goats when we look at material from the wells we are dealing with the end of the site it's a later phase of occupation and essentially the material that we find there in terms of animals is slightly different all the animals in the worlds are domestic we see the transition within the site and that is a unique feature [Music] pollen and seeds extracted from the sediments also reflect the agricultural transition and give an idea of the vegetation and climate that was the norm here in prehistoric time [Music] the average temperature was three degrees lower than today with greater differences between the seasons and colder seawater once they reach the bottom of the well the archaeologists had enough Clues to reconstitute the sequence of events that forced it to be abandoned with the sea Rising salt water percolated up through the sand and contaminated the fresh water table under the well it's very hard to abandon your house to abandon your village so naturally we assume that they struggle to try to solve problems and actually we found evidence in the well of trying to cope with the problems those who had spent so much effort building it tried to restore its function by raising its base in vain she was so close so the world was no use anymore so at that moment they still used it but as a garbage pit the sea level kept Rising slowly but inexorably one wonders where did the water come from ice when ice keeps piling up on continents the world's sea level goes down in the days of athlete yam the melting phase of the last ice age was well underway but North America was still covered by the most imposing of the ancient ice giants glaciers have left behind deep scars in the granite of the North Shore of the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec they are vivid evidence of the scope of the planetary upheaval that had repercussions on early civilizations settle near Shores at the rate of half a meter per Century the rising sea eventually forced the people of athlete young to abandon the land of their ancestors the Canadian Glacier would keep feeding the sea until the Bronze Age some 3000 years later to date on the abandoned site researchers have identified over 70 structures of various functionalities and dwellings with rectangular foundations of which only the first row of stones remain [Music] thank you [Music] at that time during the Preparatory and Neolithic period people used to bury their dead underneath the living flow which is very interesting if you come to think about it the notion of the idea of separating the world of the dead and the world of the living is quite a late notion so in neolithic side it is quite easy to find human skeleton because once you find the structure you know for sure underneath the floor you will find human skeleton [Music] the graves at athlete yam didn't contain only bones sealed in the anaerobic environment of clay for thousands of years these remains present the best preserved human and viral DNA samples of prehistory [Music] good morning everyone and today is going to be a bit of a charge day uh first thing Jonathan is the first safety who told me about two minutes before I went diving that we were going to start to excavate the new well the feature number 80 which he just discovered this year every dive over atletium brings about its share of discovery this new structure spotted during the mission preparation may turn out to be a well a storage pit or a burial site [Music] [Music] despite the risk and the long hours spent underwater diving is a passion for underwater archaeologists that does not relieve them from the tedious monk work generally associated with classic archeology [Music] okay so we will use dish ES this is a bone tool this is a spatula from the 20 centimeters in the well so this is the festival we have yeah final material we put here and the organic material you put there make sure that you don't break it while while doing it you have to feel it but there is a high probability that it is the same out effect it was broken in Antiquity and maybe dark you see this is the spatula and believe me I didn't dive here the last night and put it there you have to trust me yes [Music] the most important chapter of prehistory is surely the period that sees nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes switching to a brand new mode of subsistence agriculture thousands of plant seeds found there were many kilograms of domesticated wheat but also barley lentils and chickpeas foreign [Music] in the beginning the inhabitants must have gathered Wild Grains as a hedge against periods of want process of harvesting and planting in the same area slowly altered the planned characteristics domesticating them probably without intent the early prehistoric farmers were busy fostering hybrids and artificial selection on their seeds these are secret blades see the shine see that it's there is a glossy here at the edge this is the original shine created by cutting width so it stays like this and you can still see the Polish nine times after nine thousand years thus the small community can feed itself and prosper all year long so much so that life expectancy in athlete yam gets a significant boost [Music] [Music] at the beginning of the summer a decline in fishing activity makes way for grain Harvest followed by the slaughtering of animals born in the spring the group then moves on to fruit and nut Gathering before a fall Seafood phase followed by the collection of wild legumes in winter as the year passes the inhabitants so green then take to the sea fishing once again in all practical senses Dr hershkovitz's lab has conducted an autopsy on all human remains excavated in atlit yam the information is coded in the balance like a huge paper folder that record almost every event in your life and you just need to know how to read the information in the film you take a film of a male and a female it's just that one is longer than the other it makes sense I mean bone growth pelvic bone articulations long bone fine structure tooth attrition are all Clues to determine age sex and General Health of individuals combining all the factors allows us to conclude that few children reached adulthood and this was at the late 19th to the water and he found some skeleton and he called me and then we took the next day when I arrived I looked around and I saw there is another skull of a baby as a in the bones you can see that he suffered from some infectional disease bacterial DNA and Bone analysis have established the oldest cases of malaria and tuberculosis which took the lives of this mother and her young child foreign Improvement of food sources implied an increase in pregnancy yet a higher mortality rate for females while boys who did become adults could live up to 50. this is a remarkable life expectancy considering other settlements around the same period those living in athletes benefited from almost everything of what is now referred to as the Mediterranean diet [Music] mastering agriculture is the main factor by which some 7 million humans at the time of atlib young became the 7 billion of today is foreign that were found together and you can see that face of the skull of the center were plastered basically they used some kind of limes to create a mask and they model the face you can see the nose you can see the teeth and actually they used seashell you know to create the eyes and the iris at the center now those cars are very interesting because at that period people used to bury their dead within the living quarters after several years it took just a skull to create a beautiful face probably put some kind of a twig over the rest of of the skull so imagine to yourself that these cars stood in it on a platform at the center of the village and together with it they were very impressive foreign [Music] worshiping your ancestor by saying that my ancestors were living here in my great great ancestor they are also living here by establishing a chain of generation from present to the Past you establish your right on the property after years of successful digs some thought there was little chance of learning much more but that was without factoring in the whim of winter storms [Music] during a routine survey dive Dr galili and his father Joseph stumbled upon three rocks protruding from the Sandy Bottom [Music] it looked like nothing they had ever discovered so far [Music] it was not a house not a tumulus an even less a storage pit ER would add a whole new dimension to the richness of the sight we know one position and we make triangulations we put the Baseline on them under the only way to get to the bottom of it is to remove the tons of sand that cover the whole sector foreign it is clearly man-made a megalith an erected Stone altar this is the spiritual heart of the small Neolithic settlement [Music] in the periphery many hearths were found along with buildings a high concentration of burial sites and an intriguing narrow Corridor 20 meters long [Music] Dr Clive Ruggles is specialized in archaeoastronomy and has worked on various prehistoric sites around the world for one point say the altar Stone and one of the things here is that there are these two long parallel walls that lead in the general direction of the altar Stone and very strange they seem to have built these two long walls only a meter apart with and what appears to have been a compressed clay surface so it seems people were walking along there and the orientation of that as far as I could discover before I came out here just looking at the plans and the the match this was roughly oriented in the direction of sunrise on the June Solstice so on the on the longest day of the year survival of people living here depended more and more on agriculture had they already observed the link between season Cycles in the Sun one of the problems of dealing with Prehistoric sites and worrying about how they related to the sky is that the sky has changed Dr Ruggles uses special astronomic software that spins the planets backward 9000 times in order to see the sky the people of atlit yam were seeing nine millenniums ago [Music] his method was already successful in establishing a solid link between astronomy and Stonehedge the famous British circle of star [Music] the archaeoastronomer needs to infer position from marine charts composed with compass error and reinvent the aspect The Horizon had from a point situated offshore 12 meters below the sea [Music] Dr ruggles's calculation shows that the sun did rise between the two walls once a year but not necessarily exactly on the summer solstice a few days before or after but it did happen within the longest days of the year luck or deliberate effort [Music] foreign [Music] closer to the altar the more it is excavated the more elements and features are exposed place that prompts respect and contemplation a few stones have fallen with time but the two meter monoliths weighing a ton each were erected like Sentinels in an arc around a central stone with a depression around it vestiges of fresh water weed and mollusks were found within indicative of water symbolically surrounding the main Stone on what is presumed to be the front of the altar many flat stones with cup marks are deployed both for offerings for social activities one cannot say foreign of a mini Stonehenge 5 000 years before the erection of that great Monument [Music] the discovery of an entire Zone seemingly dedicated to spiritual or ritual activities is an indication that the people of atletium gave themselves the means to preserve Collective knowledge the agricultural tradition foreign [Music] ends on an experiment with the hopes of making other underwater finds more predictable we get finished to excavate everything that we planned to and even more we made the experiments we took the call samples and we made the jet drillings Dr galilei's team helps to help the new generation of underwater archaeologists to find other sites like this one [Music] foreign [Music] has a lot to tell us the evidence for the bones testified to a very peaceful community we don't have evidence for trauma whatsoever which is quite strange because people were expecting at least the first farming Community to be more aggressive protecting their territories in a way but at least for motility on we can conclude that the level of aggression was very low [Music] foreign Coast the sun doesn't rise exactly at the same place it used to at least yam findings are casting a new light on the dawn of human civilization and on people who might have been ancestors for many of us today whether or not we find another drowned city as old as this one atlitiamo remain an example a source of motivation for future generations of archaeologists to look for some of Mankind's First Steps at the bottom of the sea

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 436,606

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, history documentary, Atlit-Yam, mystery of atlit-yam, atlit-yam, atlit-yam israel, atlit yam documentary

Id: q8jPnvBNYbQ

Length: 48min 55sec (2935 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 11 2022