Case file · Anomaly hotspot
Atlit Yam, a drowned Neolithic village
In 1984 marine archaeologist Ehud Galili spotted a submerged Neolithic village 300 to 400 m off Atlit, south of Haifa, dating to the late 7th and early 6th millennia BCE.
1984 CE · 32.71, 34.94 · status: official
The account
The site has stone-and-clay house foundations, a dry-stone well 5.5 m deep, tools, and a semicircle of large standing stones around a spring. It holds at least 90 human burials, the only in-situ burials in any Mediterranean underwater site. Galili thinks the well's water turned salty as the sea rose and drove the people out; the sea had covered the village by about 7,000 years ago. Its people combined farming, herding and fishing.
The sceptical view
A documented prehistoric site; its standing stones are sometimes misused in lost-civilisation books.
Connections in the atlas
- The Black Sea deluge hypothesis
- Pavlopetri, the oldest drowned town
- Doggerland, the land under the North Sea