Did Goats Eat Early Humans Out of House and Home?

A mysterious, seemingly peaceful force drove people from villages like this throughout the region nearly 8,000 years ago, foiling one of mankind’s first drives toward civilization.

In chips of charcoal, slivers of plaster and trash heaps of bones, archeologists say they have found a major suspect--the domesticated goat.

“Goats are referred to as the black plague of the desert,” said Gary Rollefson of San Diego State University. Archeologists suggest that voracious, newly domesticated animals destroyed the soil and ate the fuel around some of humanity’s earliest settlements, helping to push people into becoming nomads.

The villages here rose about the same time as those in ancient Mesopotamia, what is now Iraq, which later evolved into civilization.

“Mesopotamia never had this abandoned period,” Rollefson said. “One of the reasons was they didn’t have goats.”

He has spent six digging seasons at Ein Ghazal on the edge of Amman, together with co-directors Zaidan Kafafi from the University of Jordan and Alan Simmons of the University of Nevada’s Desert Research Institute in Reno.

Their work, completed this summer, uncovered one of the Middle East’s more important archeological sites, a village roughly three to four times the size of ancient Jericho that traded with other peoples hundreds of miles away.

“It was one of the largest population centers of its time,” Rollefson said, estimating that at its peak, as many as 3,000 people might have been crowded into its 35 acres.

Jericho, about 30 miles to the west, and other early settlements in the region were abandoned about 6,500 BC, Rollefson said. But Ein Ghazal hung on for another 1,500 years near the edge of the great Arabian deserts.

Ein Ghazal’s survival, despite a drier location, argues against the more common theory that villagers abandoned the early settlements when the climate warmed, making farming and food gathering too difficult, he said.

But goats were first domesticated about 7,000 BC and rapidly became a major source of food in the region.

Villages like Ein Ghazal depended on a good source of water and on nearby trees for fuel to produce plaster or cook food and for pillars in their homes, as well as to protect against soil erosion. “Trees are a renewable resource. But goats eat anything that grows and trees don’t move very fast. . . . So you don’t get any regrowth of the forest,” Rollefson said.

“The soil was completely eroded, washed away,” when the village was abandoned about 5,000 BC, he added.

The excavations showed progressive evidence of environmental deterioration as the village matured: Chunks of charcoal became smaller, roof beams thinner, animal bones less varied. “That’s an indication they’d been destroying the habitat for all these wild animals,” Rollefson said.

Ein Ghazal was discovered in the early 1980s when road builders bulldozed through the site. The most spectacular discovery came during the first digging season in 1983, when archeologists unearthed 25 clay human figures dated to the 68th Century BC which may have been used in a cult of ancestor worship.

When the first was found, Rollefson said, “the hair on the back of my neck literally stood up. I was looking at a face looking back up at me undisturbed for about 9,000 years.”