No one has met my challenge of anything older than 6000 years.
Genesis 10 mentioned Nineveh and Uruk (Erech in Hebrew) as cities built by nonexistent mythological Nimrod, post Flood.
But the earliest foundation of permanent settlement in Nineveh is about 8000 years ago or 6000 BCE.
While the earliest Uruk (Erech) is about 7000 years ago or 5000 BCE.
The earliest mention of Jericho is in Numbers 22, doesn’t say anything about when Jericho was built, but it is archaeologically even older than Nineveh and Uruk. The Bronze Age Jericho and Neolithic Jericho is located at site underneath Tell es-Sultan.
Like most ancient cities that existed in the Fertile Crescent, each of the cities were often successively built on top of earlier settlements. There are about 20 successive layers of (Jericho) at Tell es-Sultan, and 18 successive settlements of Uruk. The bottom layer is always the evidence of the earliest permanent settlement.
So the bottom layer of Tell es-Sultan, is the earliest permanent settlement of Neolithic Jericho, dated to as early as 11,400 years ago or 9400 BCE. Around 8600 BCE, Jericho expanded into the earliest city, large enough to population of over 1000 people, where houses were circular floor plan, using sun-dried clay bricks. But more importantly, the city was surrounded by 3-metre high stone fortified walls, along with a single 8-metre high tower; these fortifications were built around. 8300 BCE.
sources: about Jericho or Tell es-Sultan:
The ages of the oldest foundations of each these ancient ruins (Jericho, Uruk, Nineveh), are all evidence that they are older than your “6000 years“ claim.
Neolithic marked the start of agricultural farming (food production via growing crops and animal husbandry) and start of permanent settlements that eventually led to cultures of urbanisation.
But Neolithic cultures only began when started because the ice sheets retreated, the annual seasons were renewed. Although the ice sheets of Quaternary Glaciation (Ice Ages) didn’t cover the entire planet, the planet was still cold and dry, which meant that there were long droughts, hence much of the Pleistocene humans living the nomadic lifestyle of hunting and gathering during the Palaeolithic periods. Not only human species have to follow game animals, they have to search for water.
The point is that the geological transition between two epochs - Pleistocene and Holocene - the date of 11,700 years, marked by dating ice core samples from Greenland and Antarctica. This date when Pleistocene ended and Holocene started, are reliable.
This date also coincided with the end of Palaeolithic and start of Neolithic, a new lifestyle for some cultures of people. By this time, the Homo sapiens were the only living species, as other human species ended some times earlier.
Source about dating Holocene using ice cores, read
Formal definition and dating of the GSSP (Global Stratotype Section and Point) for the base of the Holocene using the Greenland NGRIP ice core, and selected auxiliary records, 2008. As this is abstract, if you want to read the full article, click on the pdf link.
Have a good one!
