Ryves_eaba8940.full.pdf (1009.88 kB)
Human footprints provide snapshot of last interglacial ecology in the Arabian interior
journal contribution
posted on 2020-10-26, 14:41 authored by Mathew 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 PetragliaThe 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 AdvancesVolume
6Issue
38Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The authorsPublisher statement
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/Acceptance date
2020-07-31Publication date
2020-09-18Copyright date
2020ISSN
2375-2548eISSN
2375-2548Publisher version
Language
- en
Depositor
Dr Dave Ryves Deposit date: 25 October 2020Article number
eaba8940Usage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedKeywords
Licence
Exports
RefWorks
BibTeX
Ref. manager
Endnote
DataCite
NLM
DC