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Tools make early Arabia-Africa link
Artifacts suggest Red Sea crossings 106,000 years ago
By Bruce Bower
Culturally speaking, ancient East
Africans were a stone’s throw away from
southern Arabia.
Stone tools collected at several sites
along a plateau in Oman and dated to
roughly 106,000 years ago match elongated cutting implements previously
found at East African sites from around
the same time, say archaeologist Jeffrey
Rose of the University of Birmingham,
England, and his colleagues. New finds
also include cores — or rocks from which
tools were pounded off with a hammer
stone — that correspond to East African
specimens, the researchers report online
November 30 in PLoS ONE.
East African sites that have yielded
these distinctive stone artifacts extend
southward along the Nile River to the
Horn of Africa.
“In the mountain of papers speculating about human dispersal
out of Africa, a link between
southern Arabia and the Nile
Valley has never been considered,” Rose says.
Either Africans crossed
the Red Sea and trekked
into southern Arabia well
before an African exodus
around 60,000 years ago, or
ancient people from Arabia
influenced African toolmaking, the
scientists suggest.
“The finds in Oman are rather spec-
tacular,” comments archaeologist
Michael Petraglia of the University of
Oxford in England. “They have a date
that is earlier than similar African arti-
facts, which could imply a migration
back to Africa or at least a flow between
African and Arabian populations.”
Although human fossils haven’t
turned up at the Arabian location or at
related African tool sites, Homo sapiens
bones date to as early as 195,000
years ago in East Africa.
It’s unclear whether toolmak-
ers in ancient Oman continued
eastward to South Asia or stayed
put. Their distinctive toolmaking
style doesn’t appear at Indian sites
dating to around 74,000 years ago,
Petraglia says.
Rose sees similarities between the
Oman tools and 50,000-year-old stone
implements previously excavated in and
around modern-day Israel. He specu-
lates that plentiful rainfall between
60,000 and 50,000 years ago made inner
parts of Arabia habitable and enabled
people in southern Arabia to spread
northward and influence toolmaking
techniques.
The new discoveries in Oman add to
evidence that people reached Arabia’s
east coast as early as 125,000 years ago
and a northern inland area by 75,000
years ago.
At least two culturally
distinct human groups
inhabited Stone Age Arabia,
Rose suspects: one in the
south and another in the
north and east. Intrigu-
ingly, DNA studies indicate
that people interbred with
Neandertals soon after
leaving Africa. An ice age
between 75,000 and 50,000 years ago
may have driven people and Neandertals
into parts of Arabia that still had water
sources, where interbreeding probably
occurred, Rose hypothesizes.
The stone tools found in Oman dis-
play few similarities to those found
at Arabia’s two other early H. sapiens
sites, in Petraglia’s view. “This must
mean that the story of migration and
survival, and out-of-Africa dispersals,
is much more complex than we have
imagined,” he says. s
r Oman tools and 50,000-year-old stone
implements previously excavated in and
around modern-day Israel. He specu-
lates that plentiful rainfall bet ween
60,000 and 50,000 years ago made inner
“The story of
migration and
survival ... is
much more
complex
than we have
imagined.”
Old head
gets mummy
makeover
Of;cials at a British witchcraft
museum have received an
unusual heads-up. A preserved
human noggin in their collection
thought to be that of a medieval
execution victim in Europe actually comes from an Egyptian
mummy, say biological anthropologist Martin Smith of England’s
Bournemouth University and
his colleagues. CT scans and
microscopic and chemical analyses of the head (shown above)
revealed Egyptian mummi;cation
techniques, including breaking of
nasal bones to remove the brain,
the researchers report online
November 24 in Archaeological
and Anthropological Sciences.
Radiocarbon dating places the
specimen at between 2,370 and
2,120 years old, during the heyday of Egypt’s Ptolemaic Kingdom
and well before medieval times.
— Bruce Bower
M. SMITH
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