All articles tagged with #arabian peninsula
Archaeologists in Saudi Arabia uncovered 120,000-year-old footprints—the oldest known on the Arabian Peninsula—alongside animal tracks at the Alathar paleolake site, suggesting early Homo sapiens briefly inhabited interior Arabia during out-of-Africa migrations before the Ice Age.
Archaeologists report 120,000-year-old Homo sapiens footprints preserved in an ancient lake bed in Saudi Arabia’s Nefud Desert, indicating early humans occupied a wetter, greener Arabian environment and moved across the peninsula sooner than previously thought, underscoring Arabia’s important role in early human dispersals.
New research suggests that there may have been a previously unknown phase of humanity’s great migration: an “Arabian standstill” of up to 30,000 years in which humans settled in and around the Arabian Peninsula. These humans slowly adapted to life in the region’s colder climate before venturing to Eurasia and beyond. The genetic adaptations involved parts of the genome related to fat storage, nerve development, skin physiology, and tiny hair-like fibers in our airways called cilia. These adaptations share striking functional similarities with those found in humans and other mammals living in the Arctic today.