When Steven Mithen's team began to dig through the desert soil, his expectations were low. "We thought it was just a big rubbish dump," he says. Still, even the prospect of rifling through trash was cause for some satisfaction. Mithen, an archaeologist at the University of Reading, UK, initially raised a few eyebrows when he told colleagues of his plans to dig for Stone Age ruins in south Jordan. "They said we'd never find anything there - it was a backwater," says Mithen. He proved them wrong by finding the remains of a primitive village. By sifting through its rubbish, he hoped to gain a glimpse of day-to-day life more than 11,000 years ago.
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