Today's interesting fact has to do with villages and the oldest found to date.

I'm not sure what defines a village verses a town. From what I remember a towns usually has a market or administrative function for surrounding villages, and villages are usually located in rural areas, but the term seems to have been blurred over the years, because I've seen villages that have all the attributes of a town, as well as being located in heavily populated areas.

As to the oldest, for some time the oldest seemed to have been one found in South America, which is over 14,000 years old. It seemed odd to me that South America, being allegedly settled long after other areas of the world, would have the oldest village, but recently in Israel they have found a village that is around 30,000 years old, and has been announced by the Israeli press as being the oldest found to date. This doesn't appear to be true however, as in Papua New-Guinea, the oldest village found to date is over 49,000 years old.

When you couple this with the oldest farm found to date, 14,000 years old, it makes you wonder if that area of the world, often considered backward, actually exported the technology that fuelled the development of humans throughout the world, although I'm sure that eventually we will find that farming of various foods have existed a lot longer than we currently believe.

In a follow on from yesterday's post, the plant that was farmed, was a type of banana. The species of banana was not one of the hybrids that we eat today where we eat a sterile fruit, but one where the corm, the base of the plant, is harvested. The corm is dried, ground into flour and made into a dough and then baked. This is done in various places in the world even to this day.