- A hunter-gatherer society in Siberia built one of the oldest fortified settlements 8,000 years ago.
- The fortress defies expectations because it's one of the oldest found that hunter-gatherers built.
- The inhabitants likely had access to abundant fish and game they may have wanted to protect.
A cluster of houses protected by trenches, earthen banks, and wooden stakes baffled archaeologists for decades.
The settlement dates to the Stone Age, a time researchers once considered too unsophisticated for such structures.
Originally, archaeologists believed similar settlements were only about 3,000 years old, Archaeology magazine reported.
But radiocarbon dating from the 1980s showed one was thousands of years older, when hunter-gatherers lived in the taiga, a cold, subarctic forest.
The result was so surprising that some of the researchers doubted their work, archaeologist Tanja Schreiber told Archaeology magazine.
Schreiber and other scientists recently retested objects and mud deposits from the site to confirm the age of a settlement near the Amnya River in western Siberia. They published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Antiquity.
The Neolithic settlement is one of the oldest known fortified structures in the world and was constructed hundreds of years earlier than most other similar structures.
These types of defensive fortifications are usually associated with agricultural societies. Researchers long considered more mobile hunter-gatherers incapable of building such sophisticated structures.
A strategic location near the river
Hunter-gatherers occasionally built fortifications in other parts of the world, "but the very early onset of this phenomenon in inland western Siberia is unparalleled," the authors wrote in the paper.
While there are older Stone Age settlements in other parts of the world, like the Göbekli Tepe in Turkey which is estimated to be 12,000 years old, the Siberian settlement is about 2,000 years older than similar structures in Europe, according to Vice.
The settlement's strategic location allowed its residents to lead "a sophisticated lifestyle based on the abundant resources of the taiga environment," Schreiber said in a statement.
The inhabitants may have had access to large populations of fish, birds, elk, beaver, and reindeer. They may have had goods to store and protect food, such as fish oil and frozen meat. Archaeologists found pottery, slate tools and weapons, and animal bone fragments at the site.
Challenging stereotypes of hunter-gatherers
The rectangular houses were between 140 and 441 square feet — about the size of some NYC apartments — and had fireplaces, suggesting people may have lived in them throughout the winter.
Walls made of earth, ditches, and fences made of wooden stakes surrounded the houses that were built into the ground. These protections may have been an attempt to dissuade other groups from raiding the settlement, according to the authors.
"The discovery challenges stereotypes of such societies as simple and mobile, revealing their ability to create sophisticated structures," Schreiber told Newsweek.
The fortifications may not have always been effective, as there's evidence that the settlement was repeatedly burned. Researchers believe the fires may have been deliberately set as an act of violence.
"The environment of western Siberia now seems to us rather harsh and unfriendly, but for hunter-gatherers and fishers it was a real paradise," Ekaterina Dubovtseva, a co-author of the study, told Archaeology magazine.
