posted on 2020-10-26, 14:41authored byMathew Stewart, Richard Clark-Wilson, Paul S Breeze, Klint Janulis, Ian Candy, Simon J Armitage, David RyvesDavid Ryves, Julien Louys, Mathieu Duval, Gilbert J Price, Patrick Cuthbertson, Marco A Bernal, Nick A Drake, Abdullah M Alsharekh, Badr Zahrani, Abdulaziz Al-Omari, Patrick Roberts, Huw S Groucutt, Michael D Petraglia
The nature of human dispersals out of Africa has remained elusive because of the poor resolution of paleoecological data in direct association with remains of the earliest non-African people. Here, we report hominin and non-hominin mammalian tracks from an ancient lake deposit in the Arabian Peninsula, dated within the last interglacial. The findings, it is argued, likely represent the oldest securely dated evidence for Homo sapiens in Arabia. The paleoecological evidence indicates a well-watered semi-arid grassland setting during human movements into the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia. We conclude that visitation to the lake was transient, likely serving as a place to drink and to forage, and that late Pleistocene human and mammalian migrations and landscape use patterns in Arabia were inexorably linked.
Funding
Max Planck Society, European Research Council (no. 295719)
Leverhulme trust (PG-2017-087)
Leverhulme Trust (ECF-2019-538)
Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship grant (FT150100215)
SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE) (no. 262618)
Australia Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship Grant (FT160100450)
Researchers Supporting Project Number (RSP-2019/126), King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
History
School
Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
Geography and Environment
Published in
Science Advances
Volume
6
Issue
38
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/