Israel launches Ubeidiya Park, where early humans lived 1.5 million years ago (2024)

A million and a half years ago, a young hominin died near the Sea of Galilee. Now for the first time tourists can come see with their own eyes where this juvenile early human lived, perished and changed our understanding of human evolution: Ubeidiya Park, a national reserve established at the open-air archaeological site of Ubeidiya, where hippos frolicked in the rivers, mammoths stomped, saber-toothed cats licked their lips over giant bovines and giraffoids loomed over all.

The earliest hominin site outside Africa is in Dmanisi, Georgia, and dates to around 1.8 million years ago. Ubeidiya is the second-earliest known site of early humans beyond Africa, dating to 1.6-1.5 million years old.

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The dedication ceremony of Ubeidiya Park, by the kibbutz of Beit Zera in the Jordan Valley, was held Thursday under the auspices of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Jordan Valley Regional Council, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and the Lake Kinneret Authority.

Having housed humans and their precursors for as much as a couple of million years, if not more, Israel is rich in archaeological sites. Dig a garden, find a basilica; renovate the living room and find an ancient mikveh under the floor; and from earlier times and climes, expand a road, find a Neolithic village. Or hike the hills and find stone axes, choppers and other tools made by precursors to humankind.

At Ubeidiya, a kibbutznik clearing the land with a bulldozer in 1959 noticed bones. Subsequent excavation led by the archaeologist Moshe Stekelis and colleagues in the 1960s led to the discovery of a vertebra that would, over half a century later, be identified as "not monkey" but "early human."

The belated analysis of the single bone proved that early humans left Africa more than once, and that more than one species of early human wandered out of Africa, according to Prof. Omry Barzilai of the IAA and Haifa University. In fact, there may have been at least three.

Who's whose hominin

Today, Ubeidiyah is about three kilometers (two miles) south of the Sea of Galilee, which is actually a freshwater lake nestled in a giant fault line. And now you can come and see it with your own eyes – but but do note that this isn't some exotic cave with stunning paleo-art and stone tools littering the ground. Hominins did begin living in caves about 2 million years ago as far as is known, but that was in South Africa, not Israel.

What you will see at Ubeidiya is the hilly landscape of the Lower Galilee, courtesy of geology, and signage, courtesy of the IAA.

That vista of gently rolling hills and, more securely, the Mediterranean climate were probably much the same for the young hominin. For the last couple of years, Prof. Barzilay, Prof. Miriam Belmaker of the University of Tulsa, and colleagues have been reconstructing the paleo-climate at Ubeidiya.

Their preliminary results suggest it was quite Mediterranean, Haaretz has learned. Balmy, like it is now.

However, while our hominin lived with a vast range of African and European animals, most of those have gone extinct – and today, if you throw a rock, you're more likely to hit a rat.

"Ubeidiya has thirty geologic layers containing evidence of human activity, the earliest of which dates back to 1.6 million years ago. The site's geology is most important for telling us about conditions on Earth between two and one million years ago," Barzilai and Belmaker said in a statement.

Note ye that the area was volcanic back then, between two and one million years ago, which is why northern Israel is rich in basalt. The rift in which the Sea of Galilee sits today (and the Dead Sea to its south) was opening up.

If you have the luck to visit Ubeidiya and spot a prehistoric stone scraper or chopper or axe on the ground, by all means, pick it up to hold. Feel the breeze on your cheeks, consider how to kill a giant buffalo or butcher a dead mammoth with that tool. Become one with the hominin who lived there 1.5 million years ago, over a million years before our species even emerged.

Then put the tool back down. All antiquities in Israel belong to the state, none may be taken as souvenirs, and discoveries should be reported to it – which is what happened with the farmer in 1959 who realized his machinery was unearthing ancient bones.

Most of the bones excavated at Ubeidiya over the years were of the said megafauna. When the vertebra was found in 1966, it was assumed to belong to a monkey and was shoved into a box and tucked away. It would languish there until an effort to recreate the paleo-climate at Ubeidiya led researchers to revisit said box in 2022, and realize it came from a hominin.

Which hominin? It cannot be categorically identified, as that's all that was found, but Barzilai is confident that it was a juvenile hom*o erectus. It would have been a big one, more than six feet tall if it had reached maturity.

What's sure, he says, is it wasn't the same type of hominin as found at Dmanisi, Georgia dating to 1.8 million years ago (i.e., 300,000 years older than the hominin at Ubeidiya – the "Israeli" one was a large-sized species like us, while the ones at Dmanisi, hom*o georgicus, were about a meter (three feet) tall. Meaning they were chimp-sized, with small brains. In fact, more than one species of hominin may have existed at Dmanisi.

All of which boils down to the biggest lesson of Ubeidiya: that more than one early human species exited Africa – certainly the type(s) found at Dmanisi and this one. Possibly also the wee beings found on Flores Island in Indonesia, hom*o floresiensis, and on Luzon Island in the Philippines, hom*o luzonensis, came from an exit by an even earlier diminutive hominin species.