The remains of a massive banquet from 12,000 years ago have been found in a cave in northern Israel.

A team excavating a burial cave in Galilee, northern Israel, uncovered the remains of at least 71 tortoises and three wild cattle.

The shells and bones showed evidence of the animals being cooked and butchered for human consumption.

The finds were in two specially crafted hollows linked to burial rituals, said the researchers writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tortoise shells were placed under, around and on top of the remains of a ritually buried shaman.

Meat from the tortoises alone could probably have fed around 35 people, according to study leader Dr Natalie Munro, from the University of Connecticut, United States.

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A rare gold coin which dates back 2,200 years, has been found in Israel.

“Intrinsically, for coin research, it’s a very exciting find,” Ariel told CNN. “This is an amazing numismatic find. The coin is beautiful and in excellent preservation. It is the heaviest gold coin with the highest contemporary value of any coin ever found in an excavation in Israel.”

Ariel said the coin weighs almost one ounce (27.71 grams), while most ancient gold coins weighed about 4.5 grams. It was minted in Alexandria, Egypt, by Ptolemy V and dates to 191 BCE. It is only the second gold Ptolemaic coin ever found in Israel.

The obverse, or ‘head’ of the coin, portrays Queen Arsinoe II Philadelphus.

The reverse, or ‘tail,’ illustrates two “overlapping cornucopias decorated with fillets,” according to the IAA.

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Analysis of the chemical makeup of the Dead Sea Scrolls show they were made in the area where the documents were found.

Proton beams have shed new light on the origin of the longest of the Dead Sea scrolls, suggesting its parchment was manufactured locally.

According to a study carried out at the labs of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Catania, Sicily, the 28-foot-long Temple Scroll was made in Qumran, in what is now Israel, in the same area on the Dead Sea coast where the faded parchments were found hidden in caves half a century ago.

The scrolls, a collection of about 900 highly fragmented documents, are considered one of the greatest archeological discoveries of the 20th century. They include the earliest written texts of the Bible and are nearly 2,300 years old. In addition to the biblical texts, the scrolls are filled with apocryphal material and sectarian writings, dating back to between 100-200 B.C. to 70 A.D.

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An 1,600-year-old synagogue has been found outside of Galilee in Israel at Horvat Kur.

To the east of the monumental wall, the researchers found a totally different situation, indicating that this space was inside the building: Here a low bench made of hewn stones and covered with grey plaster runs alongside the wall, interrupted only by an entrance roughly in the center of its excavated part. The floor was made of grey hard plaster. It will need to be checked in the future if there are additional floor layers below.

Taken all the available evidence together, it seems very likely that the Kinneret Regional Project 2010 has discovered a part of the western wall of yet another ancient Galilean synagogue. Together with the well-known synagogues at Capernaum and Chorazin (both around the fifth and sixth century AD, the new synagogue at Horvat Kur — tentatively dated to the fourth or fifth century AD — adds new evidence for a very tight net of synagogues in a relatively small area on the Northwestern shores of the Lake of Galilee.

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Some yobs have defaced a 19th-century Ottoman-era site in Jaffa, Israel, as well as the archaeological equipment left there.

“The site was significantly damaged. Several of the old stone walls were pushed over and are simply destroyed. The cobblestone road was damaged and water pipes were also defaced,” he said. “Considerable damage was done, but the site has not been destroyed completely.”

In addition to defacing historical structures, the perpetrators also damaged the archaeologists’ equipment. “Our nets were torn and fences were ripped down,” Arbel said. “They also created safety hazards, cutting electrical wires and taking down a fence that protected passersby from falling into the wells.” He said the hazards had since been fixed and the equipment repaired.

The Israel Antiquities Authority filed a complaint with the police yesterday, but no suspects have yet been detained.

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