When did humans start settling down? In Israel, new discoveries at one of the world’s oldest villages are upending the debate about when we stopped wandering

When I read articles like this, I'm reminded of the truism that all the human fossils we've ever found amount to only a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of all humans who ever lived. We're not even seeing the tip of the iceberg: we're just seeing a tiny scraping from the tip of the iceberg, based on the happenstance of the survival of a random bone here and a random tooth there.

Similarly, with archaelogy, our studies are restricted to the sites that survive. This is why the stereotype of our ancestors being "cavemen" took hold - because we found lots more artefacts in the protected environments of caves than out on weather-exposed plains or in biologically active forests.

So, when we find "the oldest" something... how do we know? It's only the oldest one we have found. Just because the earliest evidence of permanent habitation or deliberate agriculture dated from 10,500 years ago, that doesn't mean that's when these things started. What if the earlier examples were made from less durable materials or in more exposed locations? A village built mostly of wood wouldn't last anywhere near as long as a village built with stone - but the wood is easier to work with, and more likely to be used before stone. There might have been hundreds of villages out there, that we will never find, because all evidence was erased by natural processes millennia before we even started looking.

Hence observations like this:

The village here flourished 2,000 years before the revolution got going, and the growing impression is of a place curiously ahead of its time—“a true turning point in human culture,”

The reason we think this village is ahead of its time is because we haven't discovered other contemporaneous villages. But what if they were commonplace at the time, and have merely been erased by wind, rain, and erosion in the 12,000 years since then?