Archaeologists in Morocco have discovered the remains of a 5,000-year-old farming society, the oldest site of its kind ever discovered in Africa outside the Nile Valley. Thousands of stone ax heads and painted pottery shards found on the site suggest a previously unknown society of hundreds of people — comparable to the size of Bronze Age Troy — who might have lived together, farmed the land, and traded with other societies across the Mediterranean.
The archaeological site of Oued Beht in northern Morocco was uncovered by French colonists in the 1930s. After the site had been overlooked for 90 years, Moroccan archaeologist Youssef Bokbot had a hunch that it may have important finds waiting just under the surface and contacted other experts to collaborate on the excavation.
The research, published July 31 in the journal Antiquity, found an "insane quantity of pottery shards and polished axes," study co-first author Giulio Lucarini, an archaeologist at the Institute of Heritage Sciences at the National Research Council of Italy, told Live Science.
By radiocarbon-dating samples of charcoal and seeds found during the excavation, the team dated the site to around 3400 to 2900 B.C. The groups that lived there likely had a variety of genetic backgrounds. According to a 2023 study co-authored by Bokbot, traditional pastoralists from the Sahara, as well as people originally from the Iberian Peninsula and the Middle East, had likely settled in this area.
"You really have Indigenous influxes all meeting in what we now realize is a melting pot," study co-first author Cyprian Broodbank, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science.
The people who lived at the site were farmers who grew barley, wheat, peas, olives and pistachios on the arid land, according to evidence of seeds found in large constructed pits. The team also unearthed the remains of sheep, goats, pigs and cattle at the site. In addition, the abundance of pottery and stone ax heads found at the site suggests that these Neolithic groups produced goods to trade with the many other Bronze and Copper Age societies that existed at this time, such as groups in the Iberian Peninsula and, potentially, Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Other studies have shown the presence of ivory and ostrich eggs in Europe during this time, but until now, archaeologists didn't have evidence suggesting which societies in Africa could have provided these goods to Europe.
Archaeologists had long assumed that, much like sub-Saharan Africa at this time, North Africa was inhabited primarily by hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, nomadic people who followed the path of grazing lands for their livestock. And while stationary farming-based societies during this time period had been found all over the rest of the Mediterranean, North Africa had been overlooked as an archaeological source.
"[Before this discovery] there was nothing to say [about farming in] North Africa outside the Nile Valley," Lucarini said.
"What we're doing here is not plonking down a [single farming society] into a pastoral world," Broodbank said. "We're actually showing that this part of the world has gone fully Neolithic, that this is part of the big world of farming. We've just found the tip of the iceberg."
Editor's note: This article was updated at 9:57 a.m. EDT on Sept. 30 to note that Cyprian Broodbank and Giulio Lucarini are the study's co-first authors.
