Ubeidiya prehistoric site

map showing the location of the historic village site (today known as Tell Ubeidiya) and the prehistoric site discovered in 1959. The prehistoric site is named for Ubeidiya, Tiberias, which was centered on Tell 'Ubeidiya but depopulated during the 1947–1949 Palestine war. The name Ubeidiya may be derived from the biblical name Obadiah; it appears on the surface to be a adjectival form of a diminutive of South Levantine Arabic abeed "slave." Abeed is the Arabic word for slave. ==Location==

Ubeidiya is located between the village Menahemia and Kibbutz Beit Zera, one kilometer northwest of the latter. The prehistoric remains were found at a site distinct from the archaeological mound (tell) known as Tell 'Ubeidiya, some 400 metres northwest of the tell. ==Excavation history==

The prehistoric site was discovered in May 1959 near the tell, south of the wadi Yavne'el/Fijjās, by a member of the kibbutz Afikim who was levelling the ground for agriculture with a bulldozer. Excavations at the site began in 1960, led by Moshe Stekelis, assisted by zoologist Georg Haas, geologists Leo Picard and Nachman Shulman and several archaeology students, including Ofer Bar-Yosef and Naama Goren-Inbar. After Stekelis died in 1967, Bar-Yosef and Goren-Inbar conducted the excavations. ==Findings==

Prehistoric human remains starting from about 1.7 Mya (million years ago), more recently redated biochronologically to 1.5 Mya, Human skeletal remains In February 2022, archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority, led by Professor Ella Been, announced the discovery of a 1.5-million-year-old complete hominin vertebra. According to the researchers, the fossilized bone belonging to a juvenile between the ages of 6-12 is the oldest evidence of ancient hominins in the Middle East. This latest discovery has shed new light on the story of early human migrations. The size and shape of the lower lumbar vertebra, dated to the Early Pleistocene, indicates that it belonged to an individual from a different species than the one represented by the 1.8-million-year-old Dmanisi hominins from Georgia. After this discovery, Omry Barzilai assumed that different human species produced the stone tool industries present at Ubeidiya and Dmanisi, respectively. The Ubeidiya child was an estimated 155 cm tall at death, Regarding the species the hominin child belonged to, the authors of the paper published in the Scientific Reports journal are adopting there the cautious attitude of declaring it as "comparable to other early Pleistocene large-bodied hominins from Africa", but due to a lack of information about its morphology beyond what can be gleaned from a vertebra, they are declining to identify its species other than it being too large to belong to H. habilis. Habitation remains and environment The site also features rock surfaces in which the prehistoric man lived during the Pleistocene period. As a result of geologic breakage and foldage activity, the rock surfaces are now inclined at an angle of 70 degrees. It is thought that the area used to feature a pristine lake along which Homo erectus lived after his exodus from Africa. The finds discovered at the site validate this theory. Archaeologists found bones of animal species that went extinct altogether, such as sabre-toothed cats, mammoths and giant buffalo, as well of species still surviving elsewhere in the world, such as baboons, warthogs, hippopotamuses, giraffes and jaguars. ==Tell 'Ubeidiya==

Ruins of the Arab village of Ubeidiya, Tiberias. On the mound once stood a walled city which controlled the crossroads of the Jordan Valley and the road linking the Golan Heights to the port of Acco. Tell Ubeidiya is considered as one of the possible candidates for the Bronze Age city of Yenoam, known from Egyptian sources, but this is a matter of speculation. A 2012 trial excavation along the western fringes of the tell uncovered remains from the Early and Late Bronze, Iron, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Early Islamic, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman periods. == See also ==