During the period known as the Old Stone Age, people lived as nomadic hunters.
They moved from place to place in search of game, and they lived in temporary shelters. During the New Stone Age, men became fitrmers and herdsmen, and they settled in permanent villages.
Ruins found in Syria show that people in this region were living in permanent villages before the year 8000 B.C., more than 1,000 years earlier than anyone had suspected.
The village of Tell Mureybut in northern Syria consisted of huts built with wooden frames and walls of packed mud. Tell Mureybut is as old or perhaps even older than the earliest known villages in Mesopotamia. It offers some of the earliest examples of real houses, as opposed to temporary shelters, that have been discovered anywhere on earth.
This ancient village also revealed the earliest signs of the worship of gods and goddesses in human form. Did the people of Tell Mureybut learn the construction of permanent dwellings and the worship of humanlike gods from another people?
Or did these practices begin in Tell Mureybut itself? If so, this little-known village could be one of the most important sites in human history.
