Researchers from Harvard and the Smithsonian have recently unearthed a 10,000-year-old village called Ain Ghazal in Jordan, one of the oldest sites showing the fateful human transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers growing crops and domesticating animals. They also made sculptures and built circular shrines. The oldest such site goes back an astounding 23,000 years—much earlier than previously supposed—and was found on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

The New York Times reports on a new scientific consensus that such settlements almost surely appeared first in modern-day Israel and Jordan; this means that civilization itself originated in the Holy Land, prior to the celebrated later developments in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

For the Biblically-minded, these stunning discoveries indicate that this very special but very small corner of planet earth—the ancient land of Israel and its immediate surroundings—was hugely important in human history long before the events described in the Old and New Testaments.