A spectacular haul of stone tools discovered beneath a rock shelter in southern Arabia has forced a major rethink of the story of human migration out of Africa.
The collection of hand axes and other tools shaped to cut, pierce and scrape bear the hallmarks of early human workmanship, but date from 125,000 years ago, about 55,000 years before our ancestors were thought to have left the continent.
The artifacts, uncovered in the United Arab Emirates, point to a much earlier dispersal of ancient humans, who probably cut across from the Horn of Africa to the Arabian Peninsula via a shallow channel in the Red Sea that became passable at the end of an ice age. Once established, these early pioneers may have pushed on across the Persian Gulf, perhaps reaching as far as India, Indonesia and eventually Australia.
Michael Petraglia, an archeologist at Oxford University who was not involved in the work, told the Science journal: “This is really quite spectacular. It breaks the back of the current consensus view.”
Anatomically modern humans — those that resemble people alive today — evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Until now, most archeological evidence has supported an exodus from Africa, or several waves of migration, along the Mediterranean coast or the Arabian shoreline between 80,000 and 60,000 years ago.
A team led by Hans-Peter Uerpmann at the University of Tubingen in Germany uncovered the latest stone tools while excavating sediments at the base of a collapsed overhang set in a limestone mountain called Jebel Faya, about 55km from the Persian Gulf coast. Previous excavations at the site have found artifacts from the iron, bronze and neolithic periods, evidence that the rocky formation has provided a millennia of natural shelter for humans.
The array of tools include small hand axes and two-sided blades that are remarkably similar to those fashioned by early humans in East Africa. The researchers tentatively ruled out the possibility of other hominids having made the tools, such as the Neanderthals that already occupied Europe and north Asia.
The stones, a form of silica-rich rock called chert, were dated by Simon Armitage, a researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London.
The discovery has sparked debate among archeologists, with some saying much stronger evidence is needed to back up the researchers’ claims.
“I’m totally unpersuaded,” Paul Mellars, an archeologist at Cambridge University, told Science. “There’s not a scrap of evidence here that these were made by modern humans, nor that they came from Africa.”
Chris Stringer, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, said: “Despite the confounding lack of diagnostic fossil evidence, this archeological work provides important clues.”
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