Oldest fortress in the world discovered in Siberia

The focus of the study was the fortified settlement of Amnya I, which is considered the northernmost Stone Age rampart in Eurasia and was located on a spur above the fish-rich Amnya River. Excavations revealed the remains of a wooden palisade, at least three moats and the foundations of ten buildings. According to an international team of researchers, these were built by hunters and gatherers.

“These mine houses are rectangular and between 13 and 41 square meters in size,” report Henny Piezonka of the Institute for Prehistoric Archeology of the Free University of Berlin and her team. “The largest of these buildings was at the tip of the ridge.” The construction of these houses suggests that they were long-term homes, the experts said.

Find challenges previous ideas
“This finding changes our understanding of early human societies and challenges the idea that only with the advent of agriculture did people begin to build permanent settlements with monumental architecture and develop complex social structures,” says Henny Piezonka on the Free website University of Berlin . cited.

Amnya I’s discovery refutes the idea that agriculture and pastoralism were prerequisites for diversified social structures. Rather, it shows that hunters and gatherers in Siberia built complex defenses around their settlements 8,000 years ago, the scientists reported in early December in the magazine ‘Antiquity’.