Items of Interest: Camels, Philistine Towns, etc
It’s been a while since i’ve been able to update. The usual excuses. A few stories of importance or at least excitement recently. Giant Camel bones found in Syria , estimated to be 100,000 years old. These guys were as big as giraffes or elephants. It seems the animals were mostly hunted for food rather than used as transportation. And seperately, at the lovely Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, a talk on November 5th with the following abstract. The Israeli Antiquities Authority has a history of excluding, and even destroying non "Israelite" archaeological finds in Palestine. This find by the IAA bolsters evidence that the majority of civilizational activity in Palestine in the 9th century BC and beyond were in the coastal regions where the indigenous Canaanite population has always lived, and continue to today as modern Palestinians. "Yavneh, a city some 20 km south of Tel Aviv, was a Philistine city on the border with Judah. It was occupied for numerous