The people that settled in this valley were in contact with cultures across the eastern Mediterranean and beyond, including the entire Near East (western Asia, Turkey and northeast Africa ).
This international travel and trade hypothesis was the subject of a fascinating open-access study published in the latest edition of
PLOS ONE , where the researchers have relied heavily on genetic and isotope data to reconstruct a dataset of over 200 individuals unearthed in the Amik Valley.
An aerial photo of Tell Atchana, where the recent study on the so-called “first international age” revealed that mobility was much less common that previously thought. (Murat Akar /