Al-Latamneh village in Hama countryside … a million years of human settlement

The village of Latamneh, is a unique site  located in the north of Hama province  as it is  one of the rare historical and archaeological sites in the world which  chronicled  the  first  existence of the early and middle Stone  Age humans .. 

Syrian and foreign excavation missions have found , during several  excavations in the village  a skeleton, bones, fossil remains and flint fragments dating back to one million years BC , the epoch which  the archaeologists  call the Pleistocene era extending from 3 million years until 10,000  years BC.  

 “ Al-Latamneh  is considered one of the most important and rarest sites of its kind  in the world, where the river bed of the Orontes River yielded the remains of human camp well-preserved within  layers from  sand and  other matter that the river had  deposited” according to the researcher Naser Flehan.

Flehan indicated  that this human camp had been  inhabited for a short time by a small group of humans who were gatherers  of wild fruits such as  hawthorn, almonds and pistachios,  and hunters of wild animal including  horses, deer, and rhinoceros. He  made it clear  that this group lived in the Orontes basin about half a million years ago and their tools consisted of axes, cleavers, and scrapers, and they built their cottages from stones and branches, using fire for warmth, light, protection, and cooking..  

On the other hand, al-Latamneh village is adjacent to Khattab village as well as Qarmashy site where the studies were conducted by the Syrian missions in the 1960s and published in Syrian archaeological journals, and many researchers have written about these sites in terms of the first human settlement areas which date back to 600,000-200,000 BC.

It is mentioned that the last mission that  excavated in the region was  a Syria-Germany mission working  between 2004 and 2009, when it  discovered that human settlement took place from around 400 to 200 thousand years BC.  

Rawaa Ghanam