A 100,000-year-old stone-carving site at Ibn Tzur was discovered at an excavation site.

• Flint tools found at the excavation site

  Photo: 

  Photo: Emil Elgam, Israel Antiquities Authority

• Youths from Dimona who helped with the archeological excavations

  Photo: 

  Photo: Emil Elgam, Israel Antiquities Authority

• Flint tools found at the excavation site

  Photo: 

  Photo: Emil Elgam, Israel Antiquities Authority

Evidence of the path of modern man's migration from Africa to the world about 100,000 years ago was recently discovered in archeological excavations near Dimona.

The excavation site, which was carried out by the Israel Antiquities Authority prior to the construction of a solar field at the site and financed by the Israel Electric Corporation, contains a site for stone-cutting from the Middle Paleolithic period. Teenagers from the city, who came to work in the excavation as summer work, helped to uncover the small site from the Stone Age, to which humans probably came due to an abundance of natural flint, from which they chose to carve their tools.

The uniqueness of the site lies in the technology of the flint stone found in it, known as "LeBloia Novi". It is a technology that originated in Africa, and research conducted at the site traces it to understand the migration routes of modern man from Africa to the rest of the world, about 100,000 years ago.

The directors of the excavation, the prehistoric Elia Abulfiya and Mia Oron from the Israel Antiquities Authority, said that this was the first evidence of the flint industry, known as "Novit", in an archeological excavation in Israel. "The products of the stonemasonry have remained exactly in the original place where man sat and created the tools. The industry is identified with the populations of modern man, who lived in East Africa 150-100 thousand years ago and migrated from there around the world," they said. The two also noted that in the last decade quite a few Nubian sites have been discovered in the Arabian Peninsula, a fact that has led many scholars to claim that the exodus of modern man from Africa was made through the Arabian Peninsula.

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"The site from Dimona probably represents the northernmost penetration of the Nubian flint industry from there, thus marking the migration route - from Africa to present-day Saudi Arabia, and from there, perhaps, to the Negev," Abulfiya and Oron added.

Svetlana Talis, an archaeologist from the Northern Negev District at the Israel Antiquities Authority, commented on the work of the youth at the site, saying that in doing so they helped their families during the Corona crisis: " The youth for the heritage that belongs to them. "