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Buried in the sand of the Arabian desert are clues to the wetter and greener past of the peninsula. Fossils of elephants, antelopes and jaguars, long gone, describe a prehistoric scene not of a wasteland, but of a thriving savannah dotted with dots. water.
Now scientists have discovered what they thought was the evidence of the activities of the first members of the human family, who lived in this ancient landscape 300,000 to 500,000 years ago. If the results are confirmed, the stone flakes and the cut-up animal bones discovered by the researchers would prove that the first hominins – extinct members of the genus Homo, but most likely not of our species – were present in the Arabian Peninsula at less than 100,000 years ago. previously known.
The findings, published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, also suggest that early hominins did not need any particular evolutionary adaptations before moving out of Africa 's meadows and into the wilds of Africa. 39; Arabia.
"As the savannah grew, so did the humanity of that time," said Michael Petraglia, archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany and author on paper.
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Dr. Petraglia has been researching the evidence of a "Green Arabia" over the past ten years. Although the Arabian Peninsula is a vital link between Africa and Eurasia, human migration through it has not been studied as well as in the Levant. And for a moment, it was thought that the region was too arid to allow the first hominins to travel.
But recent discoveries are changing this story and indicate that the region may have experienced cycles of drought and greenery. Earlier this year, his team said he found a finger bone of Homo sapiens nearly 90,000 years old in the desert. His group has identified traces of about 10,000 ancient lakes dried up with the help of satellite images.
A few years ago, he and his colleagues collected fossils of several extinct Arab mammals at a site in the Nefud Desert in Saudi Arabia. Under a microscope, it appeared that a bone of the thorax had cutting marks in a sharp stone tool.
"I do not think I understood the gravity of the situation," said Mathew Stewart, PhD student at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. "I did not know it would be the oldest evidence of people in the peninsula so far and no one had found anything like it before."
In addition to the marked fossils, the team found on the site flakes of stone from the manufacture of stone tools.
"The stone tools add the nail to the coffin," Stewart said, providing evidence that hominins had slaughtered these bones.
The team had also collected more than 20 fossilized teeth on the site from herbivores such as antelopes, elephants and ancient horses. Patrick Roberts, archaeological scientist of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and lead author of the study, analyzed the tooth enamel for carbon isotope data and oxygen.
The tooth enamel develops gradually, like tree rings, which helps to better understand the changes that have occurred over a period of time. Signatures of carbon isotopes have provided information on the diet of herbivores. The oxygen isotope reflects the source of water for precipitation, moisture content and temperature.
Dr. Roberts' analysis showed that mammals had a diet composed of plants found in the grasslands, suggesting that precipitation, where they lived, occurred during the hot season. And the oxygen isotopes indicated that conditions were much wetter in the area.
Currently, the team says the site's fossils could be 500,000 years old. As the earliest known evidence of Homo sapiens goes back to Morocco, about 300,000 years ago, scientists do not think that the hominin who created these marks was the Homo sapiens. This means that the first hominins who had left Africa across Arabia did not need to be biologically equipped to cope with a harsher environment than the one they were leaving.
"These hominins met in Saudi things that looked a lot like what we are thinking about today in the East African savannah," said Dr. Roberts. "They do not disperse in a desert, we claim that this is just part of the range extension."
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