Two major archaeological discoveries were uncovered in northern Israel earlier this month: two rare, intact Roman marble statues and a prehistoric cave used by early humans roughly 300,000 years ago.
The marble statues, which depict historical figures from the Greek and Roman worlds in stunning detail, were found in the collection pit of a Roman-Byzantine winepress dating to about 1,700 years ago. The sculptures are protomes, meaning they depict the head and upper torso of a person.
Eliran Oren and Avishag Reiss, excavation directors for the Israel Antiquities Authority, noted that the finding was especially unusual because the statues had been neatly laid face down in the collection pit, seemingly intentionally buried there when the winepress fell out of use.
“At present, it is not known why the statues were hidden here – perhaps to preserve them,” Oren and Reiss said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.”
Michael Sorotskin, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, described the moment when the statues were uncovered as “simply wondrous.”
“While digging the winepress, something was sticking out of the ground, and the workers called me,” said Sorotskin. “There was a feeling that we were about to discover something that really shouldn’t be there. Suddenly, we saw that this was not the usual pottery – it was marble! Then, slowly, slowly, the two statues were revealed. I’m still struggling to find the right words.”
One of the statues bears the name Lycurgus. Dr. Peter Gendelman, a Caesarea region expert with the Israel Antiquities Authority, explained that the inscription could refer to two significant figures in Greek history: Lycurgus, the legendary lawgiver of Sparta, or Lycurgus of Athens, a famed 4th-century BCE statesman and orator.
“During the Roman period, statues of this type were displayed both in public buildings and in the homes of the elite, who sought to connect themselves to the cultural and spiritual world of antiquity,” Gendelman said. “Not far from the discovery site, remains of a bathhouse were previously uncovered, and it is possible that the statues decorated a luxurious villa of a Caesarea resident.”
Gendelman added that the last time such a figure was discovered in this area was in the 1990s.
The statues will be on public display at Tel Aviv’s MUZA – Eretz Israel Museum throughout the summer, after which they will undergo cleaning and conservation. Researchers will also attempt to determine with certainty who the statues depict and why they were deliberately buried.
‘A unique site of global importance’
Just a few miles north of where the statues were uncovered, archaeologists also discovered a prehistoric human cave near the town of Fureidis dating to between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago.
The cave remained sealed for hundreds of thousands of years, preserving a remarkable record of life within the Acheulo-Yabrudian people, an early human toolmaking culture that lived in modern-day Israel, Lebanon, and Syria.
Before the Acheulo-Yabrudians, early humans primarily relied on teardrop-shaped hand axes, an all-purpose stone with a rounded point that was used across Africa, Europe, and the Middle East for over a million years. Afterwards was the next major stable development, when humans began making more precise tools by striking flakes from prepared stone cores and shaping them into a range of tools, each with a specialized purpose.
The Acheulo-Yabrudians are considered the stepping stone between those two phases, the period when both the old stone hand axes and the new precision tools were being used side by side. This was a period of experimentation and development, the step that led humans to gradually abandon the old, rounded stone hand axe for the more specialized toolmaking that defined the era that followed.
The Acheulo-Yabrudians were also surprisingly advanced on some fronts. They developed a specialized preparation process for producing long stone blades, enabling them to produce a series of near-identical blades far more efficiently. But this systematic blade production process vanished during this period, only to be reinvented from scratch some 200,000 years later.
Additionally, at one site known as the Qesem Cave in central Israel, archaeologists found that the Acheulo-Yabrudians organized their living space, dedicating different areas to different tasks, such as a spot for butchering meat near the hearth, and a separate area for toolmaking. They also used fire routinely and in a controlled way, one of the clearest early examples of such habitual hearth use.
“We have been fortunate to excavate a unique site of global importance that has been protected from the ravages of time thanks to the exceptional conditions that existed here,” said Prof. Ron Shimelmitz of the University of Haifa.
“This time capsule belongs to a unique period at the end of the Lower Palaeolithic era, just before Neanderthals and modern humans became dominant and spread across many regions. Only a handful of sites from this important phase have been uncovered in Israel and the wider Levant, and most of them are inaccessible for research,” explained Shimelmitz. “The gradual changes that emerged during this period in human physiology, technology, and society foreshadowed the traits and complex behavioral patterns that developed later and characterize both Neanderthals and modern humans. To a degree, they can be seen as the seeds that led to the development of our complex culture.”
“One of the central processes taking place during this period is the transition to living in larger groups and spending longer periods at the same sites,” Shimelmitz added. “Caves from this period have yielded evidence of intensive use of fire and prolonged human activity, suggesting complex and rich camp life. These are findings that many researchers associate with the development of social cooperation and the transmission of knowledge, as part of the processes of human evolution.”
Dr. Kobi Vardi, head of the Prehistory Branch at the Israel Antiquities Authority, noted that the site will allow archaeologists to study in high resolution how humans lived at that time.
“It is very rare to find a site in such a state of preservation. Every prehistorian who visits the site is absolutely thrilled,” said Vardi. “The culture we are investigating here was characterized by a variety of advanced methods for producing flint tools, including small sharp handaxes, scrapers, and blades. The excavation is also uncovering animal bones, including fallow deer, gazelle, and ancient horses, alongside evidence of the presence of water, which may have made the site attractive for ancient hunter-gatherer groups.”
In light of the finding, the Israel Antiquities Authority and the University of Haifa are now working on a large-scale research program that seeks to reconstruct how humans lived, adapted to their environment, and developed new lifestyles and technologies over the course of human evolution.
