History of how Israel's wall failed 7 thousand years ago for protecting land from sea

A wall created by later stone - age villagers in Israel is the oldest coastal protection system known against rising sea level.

The 7,000-year-old wall in Carmel Coast was built by ancient settlers using stones brought from river beds up to two kilometers from their village.

Unfortunately for the settlers, the 100m long protection provided only a temporary return from rising waters, experts said.

After all, the village had been abandoned, and the sea flooded its homes.

Archaeologist Ehud Galili of Haifa University and his colleagues discovered the wall to protect Tel Hreiz's residence, which lies on Israel's Carmel Coast.

The country was now fully immersed for the first time in the 1960s, but the area containing the sea was only exposed by winter storms in 2012.

The village would have been originally built at a safe height of 3m above sea level a dim security gap, as melted glaciers caused sea levels to rise.

“During the neolitti, Mediterranean populations would have suffered an increase of sea level 4-7 mm per year, or approximately 12-21cm in a lifetime of up to 70cm for 100 years,” said Galli.

This scale of sea level growth means that the frequency of devastating storms damaging the village would have increased significantly. Eventually, the annual accumulated sea level demanded a human response involving the construction of a coastal wall similar to what we are now seeing all over the world,” he added.

Archaeologist Jonathan Benjamin of Australia's Flinders University says there are no similar structures built in any of the other villages immersed in the region, making this “a unique example of this visible evidence for the human response to the rise of sea level at Neopik”.

In view of the size of coastal populations and settlements, the size of the population projected in the future differs considerably from the effects on people during the Neopic period,”, it said.

Climate scientists are predicting that sea level levels in the 20th century will vary from about 1.7 to 3 mm per year.

Although it will be smaller than the changes that threatened the late stone-era community at Tel Hreiz, we will face the same challenge, the team noted.

Many of the basic human questions and decision-making regarding human resistance, coastal protection, technological innovation, and decisions to finally abandon long settlements remain important,” said Galili.