{"it":{"id":"LEV-ATL","kind":"site","sub":"Asia","name":"Atlit Yam (submerged PPNC village)","place":"Israel","lat":32.711,"lon":34.935,"date":"PPNC (INTERPRETATION)","mat":"stone, chert","nfacts":5,"tags":["Asia"],"sum":"Between 300 and 400 m off the coast of Israel, 8 to 12 m under the sea, lie the stone houses, wells and graves of Atlit Yam, a village that drowned about 8,000 years ago.","why":"A drowned farming village holds some of the earliest evidence for tuberculosis and a test case for sudden sea disasters.","src":[439,636],"nsrc":3,"yt":"What else did rising seas take?","rel":["ASI-DWA","CUB-MEG"],"hook":"Off Israel, a drowned village holds a woman and infant buried together, with tuberculosis 9,000 years old."},"S":{"439":["Wikipedia: Atlit Yam","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlit_Yam"],"636":["Galili et al. 1993, Atlit-Yam: A Prehistoric Site on the Sea Floor off the Israeli Coast, J. Field Archaeology","https://doi.org/10.1179/jfa.1993.20.2.133"]},"rec":{"id":"LEV-ATL","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"site","a":"offshore distance","v":"300-400","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Atlit Yam","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Atlit Yam","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atlit_Yam&oldid=1382539630","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3490"},{"f":"site","a":"depth","v":"8-12","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Atlit Yam","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Atlit Yam","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atlit_Yam&oldid=1382539630","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3491"},{"f":"well","a":"diameter / depth","v":"1.5 / 5.5","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Atlit Yam","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Atlit Yam","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atlit_Yam&oldid=1382539630","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"4 use levels","id":"M3492"},{"f":"chert","a":"source","v":"Mount Carmel ~4 km E","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Atlit Yam","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Atlit Yam","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atlit_Yam&oldid=1382539630","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M3493"},{"f":"Etna collapse tsunami","a":"hypothesis","v":"~8,500 yr ago, 40 m wave","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Atlit Yam","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Atlit Yam","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atlit_Yam&oldid=1382539630","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"INGV Pisa","id":"M3494"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"height","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"key_structure_dims","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"largest_block","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"block_mass","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"stone_count","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"slope_face_angle","r":"no published face/slope angle in sources reached (often n/a for non-pyramidal sites)"},{"a":"wall_batter","r":"no published batter survey in free sources"},{"a":"orientation","r":"no published azimuth reached"},{"a":"corner_precision","r":"no published precision survey in free sources"},{"a":"rock_type","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"geochem_petro","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"quarry_source","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"mortar","r":"dry-stone construction or no binder analysis in free sources"},{"a":"tool_marks","r":"no tool-mark study in free sources reached"},{"a":"dating","r":"no absolute date extracted"},{"a":"coords_elevation","r":"no elevation row yet"},{"a":"volume_labor","r":"no volume/labour estimate in sources opened"},{"a":"construction_phases","r":"no phase sequence in sources opened"},{"a":"lab_date_material","r":"no lab date with dated material in sources opened"},{"a":"hydrology_acoustics","r":"no published hydrology/acoustic measurement in sources opened"},{"a":"magnetic_radiation","r":"no published magnetic/radiation survey found (searched site name + magnetometry/radiation; Wikipedia, Google Scholar snippets)"},{"a":"metals_clamps","r":"no metal/clamp evidence reported in sources opened"},{"a":"excavation_history","r":"no excavation history row yet"},{"a":"artifacts_found","r":"no finds row yet"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA074","a":"lost submerged civilisation","who":"see anomaly_claims","main":"PPNC village drowned by sea rise","ms":"","st":"supported-explained","n":"tsunami hypothesis only","nl":3}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"PPNC (INTERPRETATION)","dm":"historical/stylistic (INTERPRETATION)","lab":"NO","weak":"no lab date opened","unesco":"","dens":"STUB"},"co":{"lat":"32.71083","lon":"34.93515","src":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q2896085)","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q2896085) vs OSM node 2570064176 delta 0.0010 deg","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2570064176"},"src":[{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia Atlit Yam","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atlit_Yam&oldid=1382539630"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Atlit Yam","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlit_Yam"},{"id":"S2637","t":"Galili et al. 1993, Atlit-Yam: A Prehistoric Site on the Sea Floor off the Israeli Coast, J. Field Archaeology","u":"https://doi.org/10.1179/jfa.1993.20.2.133"},{"id":"VLEV-ATL-4","t":"Hershkovitz et al. 2008, Detection and molecular characterization of 9000-year-old Mycobacterium tuberculosis from a Neolithic settlement in the Eastern Mediterranean (PLOS ONE)","u":"https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0003426"},{"id":"VLEV-ATL-5","t":"Galili et al. 2013, submerged Neolithic settlements off the Carmel coast, Israel (PDF copy)","u":"https://www.ancientportsantiques.com/wp-content/uploads/Documents/PLACES/Levant/Israel-Galili2013.pdf"},{"id":"VLEV-ATL-6","t":"Galili & Nir 1993, The submerged Pre-Pottery Neolithic water well of Atlit-Yam, northern Israel, and its palaeoenvironmental implications (The Holocene)","u":"https://doi.org/10.1177/095968369300300309"},{"id":"VLEV-ATL-7","t":"Pareschi et al. 2006, Lost tsunami (Geophysical Research Letters)","u":"https://doi.org/10.1029/2006GL027790"},{"id":null,"t":"Ehud Galili, Baruch Rosen, Mina Weinstein Evron, Israel Hershkovitz, Vered Eshed and Liora Kolska Horwitz, “Israel: Submerged Prehistoric Sites and Settlements on the Mediterranean Coastline—the Current State of the Art”, in The Archaeology of Europe’s Drowned Landscapes (Springer, Coastal Research ","u":"https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37367-2_23"},{"id":null,"t":"Israel Hershkovitz, Helen D. Donoghue, David E. Minnikin et al., “Detection and Molecular Characterization of 9000-Year-Old Mycobacterium tuberculosis from a Neolithic Settlement in the Eastern Mediterranean”, PLOS ONE 3:10 (2008), e3426.","u":"https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003426"},{"id":null,"t":"Maria Teresa Pareschi, Enzo Boschi and Massimiliano Favalli, “Holocene tsunamis from Mount Etna and the fate of Israeli Neolithic communities”, Geophysical Research Letters 34 (2007), L16317. Abstract via Crossref.","u":"https://doi.org/10.1029/2007GL030717"},{"id":null,"t":"Ehud Galili, “Architecture: Structures and Installations at the PPNC Atlit-Yam Site”, in Galili and Horwitz (eds), Atlit-Yam, a Submerged Pre-Pottery Neolithic C Site off the Carmel Coast, Israel (Springer, 2025). Abstract and notes.","u":"https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-03014-6_3"}],"sum":"The bottom two metres of the well are packed with stones. Large stones, and in the excavators' reading they were put there on purpose, by people who needed the floor of their well to be higher than it was. Divers found them ten metres under the Mediterranean, off the coast of northern Israel, in a shaft that had been cut through bedrock nine thousand years ago to reach fresh water. The stones are a message from a community that could taste the problem before it could name it. The water was turning salty, and the sea was coming.\n\nThe village is Atlit Yam. It lies in the North Bay of Atlit, about 10 km south of Haifa, between 8 and 12 m below today's sea level. How far offshore depends on which paper you read: Ehud Galili's 2020 summary says 200 to 400 m, the 2008 tuberculosis study says 300 to 500 m, and the record's survey row gives 300 to 400 m. Galili and his colleagues, who have spent decades on the site, date it to roughly 9400 to 8000 years ago, the end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, the age just before people on this coast learned to fire clay into pots. Another radiocarbon span quoted for the site runs from about 9250 to 7970 calibrated years before present. Either way, it is about nine thousand years old, and it covers about 40,000 square metres, roughly the area of six football pitches.\n\nIt is hard to work. The site lies under one to two metres of sand, and only storms uncover it. Parts are exposed at random, so divers wait for heavy weather, then go down to survey and rescue what the sea has briefly revealed before the sand closes over it again. What they have recovered, piece by piece, is a complete farming and fishing settlement: rectangular stone houses, about 20 stone-lined storage pits, walls up to 60 m long, more than 6,000 fish remains, and animal bones dominated by goat (44 per cent) and cattle (43 per cent). The chert for their tools came from Mount Carmel, about 4 km to the east. About 63 people were buried among the houses; another count gives 65, which the current record notes is almost half of all known burials of that period in the Levant. One in four of the men had bony growths in the ear canal of the kind caused by diving in cold water. These were people who worked the sea long before it swallowed them.\n\nTwo finds made Atlit Yam famous. The first is the wells. Galili's team calls them \"the earliest constructed water wells in the world.\" The largest is about 1.5 m across and 5.5 to 5.7 m deep, depending on the measurement, lined with some 28 courses of stone and dug down through rock to the fresh groundwater. The second is a ring of standing stones. The northern structure has stones up to 1.8 m high set in a circle, slabs lying to the west, and \"tens of cup marks\" pecked into the rock around it. The excavators read it as a cult site, \"probably associated with fresh water.\" A second megalithic group to the south has three stones about 1.7 m long, each weighing 450 to 550 kg, and two of them have a groove cut round one end to mark \"a schematic head.\" A corridor of parallel walls leads toward the circle. The archaeoastronomer Clive Ruggles, in a personal communication cited by Galili's team, suggested it could align with sunset on the longest day. That is an idea, not a finding, and Galili's 2025 volume says the material from the megalithic structure \"will be published in detail separately.\"\n\nThen there is the grave that put Atlit Yam into medical history. A woman lies buried with an infant, the woman \"presumed to be the mother.\" In 2008 a team led by Israel Hershkovitz and Helen Donoghue reported DNA of the tuberculosis germ in their bones, and confirmed it with a second, independent chemical test for the germ's cell wall. Galili's team calls it \"the earliest confirmed report of this disease in humans.\" The authors add a grim note: untreated tuberculosis in recent times killed 30 to 40 per cent of infants and mothers, so \"it is unsurprising for both mother and child to succumb\" together. Goats, cattle, crowded houses, a new way of living close to animals: the village may have been incubating one of humanity's oldest companions.\n\nSo how did the sea take it? The mainstream answer is written in the wells themselves, which double as tide gauges. In 1993 Galili and Yaacov Nir showed that sea level on this coast stood about 16 m below today around 7,900 years ago, and they estimated it was rising by 15 to 20 mm a year, \"which is a high figure.\" The 2020 summary gives a lower rate of 11 to 13 mm a year during the occupation. Even the lower number means more than a metre of water every century. On a flat coast, that moves a shoreline a long way. The lower fill of the big well holds gypsum, a mineral that points to salt water, and the stones piled at its base look like an attempt to raise the floor toward fresher water. Later the well became a rubbish pit. Galili's team concludes that \"the slow and inexorable rise of sea level\" explains the change and the final abandonment.\n\nThe rival story is far more dramatic. In 2006 Maria Teresa Pareschi, Enzo Boschi and Massimiliano Favalli modelled a collapse of Mount Etna's eastern flank, dated in the record to roughly 8,000 to 8,500 years ago. In their simulation the resulting tsunami reaches about 40 m on the coast of Calabria and 2 to 4 m on the coast of Israel. They wrote that Atlit Yam might have been abandoned \"because of impact by the same Etna tsunami.\" In 2007 they went further, arguing that field evidence showed an event causing \"the sudden death of tens of inhabitants,\" and pointing to a filled well and a layer of reworked marine sediment.\n\nGalili's team rejects it. They report \"no evidence of tsunami deposits,\" no damaged buildings, no whole animal carcasses and no traumatic injuries of the kind a wave might cause, and they answered formally in 2008. The burials support them. Most graves are orderly pits beside the houses, bodies flexed, some with grave goods: a community laying its dead to rest over generations, not a single day of disaster. The record grades the drowned-civilisation question accordingly. A Neolithic village drowned by sea rise is the supported explanation, and the tsunami remains a hypothesis.\n\nAnd yet the strongest point Atlit Yam makes is the one that outlasts the argument. A whole village, with wells, a stone circle and a cemetery, lay unknown under ten metres of water until divers found it, and even now it shows itself only when a storm pulls back the sand. It sits on a coast where the sea once stood 16 m lower. Every metre of that lost shoreline was dry land when people were building, farming and watching the sky, and almost all of it has never been searched. The circle's purpose is unpublished. The speed of the end is still argued in millimetres. Where the people went after their wells failed, the seabed does not say.\n\nThe record's own question is the right one to leave with. If one storm-scoured patch of sand off Haifa holds the world's oldest wells, its oldest confirmed tuberculosis and a ring of standing stones, what else did the rising seas take?","qs":["What else did rising seas take?","A slow-rising sea or a sudden wave: what evidence on the seabed could tell them apart?","Did farming, cattle and crowded villages help tuberculosis spread?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/Atlit-Yam%2C_Ritual_structure_made_of_stones.JPG/1280px-Atlit-Yam%2C_Ritual_structure_made_of_stones.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlit-Yam,_Ritual_structure_made_of_stones.JPG","title":"Atlit-Yam, Ritual structure made of stones.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Hanay","cap":"Atlit Yam is an ancient submerged Neolithic village off the coast of Atlit, Israel. The site is dated to the final Pre-Pottery Neolithic B site of Atlit Yam dat"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/Alit-Yam_%E2%80%93_Human_skeleton.JPG/1280px-Alit-Yam_%E2%80%93_Human_skeleton.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alit-Yam_%E2%80%93_Human_skeleton.JPG","title":"Alit-Yam – Human skeleton.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Hanay","cap":"Atlit Yam is an ancient submerged Neolithic village off the coast of Atlit, Israel. 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The site is dated to the final Pre-Pottery Neolithic B site of Atlit Yam dat"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Dolmen_in_Johfiyeh_Irbid_north_of_Jordan_Dec2009.jpg/1280px-Dolmen_in_Johfiyeh_Irbid_north_of_Jordan_Dec2009.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dolmen_in_Johfiyeh_Irbid_north_of_Jordan_Dec2009.jpg","title":"Dolmen in Johfiyeh Irbid north of Jordan Dec2009.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Telfah ahmed","cap":"Dolmen_in_Johfiyeh_Irbid_north_of_Jordan_Dec2009"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"7","u":"megaliths","h":"A semicircle of 600 kg stones, now underwater","s":[169]},{"v":"Stone, chert","h":"Made of","s":[169]}],"hs":{"169":["Wikipedia: Atlit Yam (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlit_Yam"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/LEV-ATL.webp","w":1280,"h":855,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/Atlit-Yam%2C_Ritual_structure_made_of_stones.JPG/1280px-Atlit-Yam%2C_Ritual_structure_made_of_stones.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}