The oldest ritual room in the Middle East was found: it could accommodate 100 people. Photo

While exploring a prehistoric cave, archaeologists found the oldest ritual room in the Middle East. The dark underground room could accommodate about 100 people.

Deep inside the Manot Cave, located on the territory of modern northern Israel, approximately 35-37 thousand years ago, Homo sapiens placed a boulder carved like a turtle shell. And they gathered here to conduct ceremonies with torches, probably inspired by mythological or religious beliefs, researchers report in PNAS.

The discovery of this special chamber in Manot Cave reveals the earliest known evidence of collective ritual practices in the Middle East, says archaeologist Omri Barzilai of the University of Haifa and his colleagues.

Activities outside of daily work, such as rituals attended by regional hunter-gatherer groups, may have taken place in the caves before anyone decorated the cave walls, suggests archaeologist Paul Pettit of Durham University in England.

A round boulder placed in a niche just inside the chamber shows engraved lines that create a three-dimensional image of a turtle shell, says Omri Barzilai. Microscopic marks inside the V-shaped grooves indicate that someone carved them into the boulder with a sharp stone.

According to scientists, the spiritual significance of turtles for the ancient inhabitants of the Middle East remains unknown. However, the shells of these majestic creatures appeared more and more often in the graves of prominent people in the region at the end of the Stone Age.

Stone tools, bones of butchered animals, and other objects previously found in various places near the entrance to Manot Cave, where people were engaged in ordinary activities from about 46,000 to 33,000 years ago. Earlier findings of fossils have shown that Homo sapiens were in this cave at least 50,000 years ago, adds ScienceNews.

The activities in the ritual room date from a time when artifacts in the living quarters demonstrate the influence of ancient European Orignac culture. Distinctive stone tools, bone points, ivory beads and figurines, and early examples of cave art characterized the Orignac groups, scientists say.

According to the researchers, particles of wood ash found in the rock inside the chamber indicate that visitors illuminated the dark space with torches.

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