Nahal Me'arot Nature Reserve
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How it came to be
Nahal Me'arot, Wadi el-Mughara in Arabic, is a valley on the western slopes of the Carmel range south of Haifa in northern Israel, lined by four caves: Tabun, Jamal, el-Wad and Skhul. UNESCO describes a 54 ha property holding deposits from at least 500,000 years of human evolution.
In the 1920s the caves were threatened by quarrying for the construction of Haifa's port. In 1928 the British archaeologist Charles Lambert made a trial excavation at el-Wad for the Department of Antiquities of Mandatory Palestine and found a bone handle carved as an animal head, which established the caves' importance and saved them. From 1929 Dorothy Garrod directed excavations over 12 seasons until 1934, setting up a chronological framework for the region's prehistory.
At Tabun a woman from a local village, Yusra, was credited with finding the Neanderthal skull known as Tabun 1, while Skhul yielded skeletons of early Homo sapiens. The caves were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2012 for showing Neanderthals and early modern humans within the same Mousterian culture, and for the Natufian burials and early stone architecture at el-Wad that mark the shift from hunting and gathering to farming.
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