Climate change and human origins in southern Arabia

Discussion in 'Middle East' started by Margot2, Apr 13, 2016.

  1. Margot2

    Margot2 Banned

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    This may help explain the early migrations out of Arabia to Mesopotamia and the Levant.. Its a bit "scholarly" and it looks at the genetics as well.

    We know that horses were domesticated in Arabia about 10,000 years ago.. and that the Peninsula was once a well watered savanna with Wadis and shallow lakes.

    http://www.academia.edu/165054/Climate_change_and_human_origins_in_southern_Arabia

    The pendulum of environmental change in Arabia has oscillated between climatic extremes throughout the Quaternary period. The landscape is riddled with evidencefor ancient pluvials, apparent in the lacustrine sediments,alluvial fans and gravels, palaeosols, and speleothems(e.g. McClure 1976; Schultz & Whitney 1986; Parker

    et al

    . 2006; Lézine

    et al

    . 2007; Fleitmann

    et al

    . 2007).Conversely, there are numerous signals that Arabia wassubjected to extremes in aridity, most obviously manifested in the expansive sand seas comprising the Nafud, Rub’al-Khali, and Wahiba deserts, as well as hyperalkalinesprings (Clark & Fontes 1990) and petrogypsic soilhorizons (Rose 2006).

    The earliest western explorers to penetrate the Rub’al-Khali often described a series of small buttes standingout in stark white or grey against the seemingly endlesswasteland of monotonous rust-coloured sand. Duringhis pioneering journey across the desert in 1932, St John Philby recognized these features as small eroded lake basins comprised of marl terraces and hardened evaporitic
     
  2. Margot2

    Margot2 Banned

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    (Phys.org) -- Satellite images have revealed that a network of ancient rivers once coursed their way through the sand of the Arabian Desert, leading scientists to believe that the region experienced wetter periods in the past.





    The images are the starting point for a major potentially ground-breaking research project led by the University of Oxford into human evolutionary heritage. The research team will look at how long-term climate change affected early humans and animals who settled or passed through and what responses determined whether they were able to survive or died out.

    Until now this part of the world has been largely ignored by scholars despite its critical location as a bridge between Africa and Eurasia. In a project funded by €2.34 million from the ERC (European Research Council), a multidisciplinary team of researchers will study the effects of environmental change in the Arabian Peninsula over the last two million years. The systematic study of the Pleistocene to Holocene periods will be unique in its length and level of detail.

    Over the course of five years the researchers will study the landscape features and excavate sites of likely archaeological interest, using the network of water courses as a map. They will use the latest dating techniques to pinpoint the ages of fossils of animals, plants and different stone tool technologies and compare the similarities and differences displayed in the region’s rock art.

    The team's main focus will be the Arabian Desert, but the work will also cover the wider Peninsula. One key question they will attempt to answer is when the first early modern humans are likely to have first arrived in the Arabian Peninsula from Africa and perhaps surrounding regions. They will also look for evidence that suggests how early modern humans were able to survive, or not, in arid and extreme conditions.

    Project leader Professor Michael Petraglia, Co-Director of the Centre for Asian Archaeology at Oxford University's School of Archaeology, said: 'From NASA images taken of the Arabian Desert we can see physical landscape features that are visible from space that denote a whole network of former river valleys and lake basins. These lines and dips in the sand provide us with a map of the region upon which we will focus our research activity. The presence of water is an accurate indicator of where early humans and animals migrated to or settled


    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-05-ancient-network-rivers-lakes-arabian.html#jCp
     
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    Margot2 Banned

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    In March, archaeologists made a discovery in Sharjah that not only promises to shed new light on the role of Arabia in prehistory but also has the potential to rewrite the history of humankind.

    The discovery was a prehistoric tool factory composed of more than a thousand stone fragments including four hand axes, scrapers that would have been used for the cleaning and preparation of animal skins and lithic preforms, rough, incomplete and unused stones still awaiting the final trimming and refinement that would have transformed them into tools.

    “They may be 200,000 or even 500,000 years old, we don’t know yet, but they certainly push back the earliest evidence for human occupation in south-east Arabia,” says Knut Bretzke from Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, Germany, the leader of the team responsible for the find made in Suhailah, north of the oasis town of Dhaid.

    Like an increasing number of archaeological finds discovered across Arabia in the last decade, Bretzke’s “lithic assemblage” poses a challenge to the standard ‘out of Africa’ model of early human dispersal that has dominated the scientific consensus since the late 1990s.

    “The model usually says that modern humans came out of Africa between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago, but it is important to realise that we now have archaeological evidence to support the theory that there was an earlier expansion of modern humans,” the archaeologist explains.

    “And now there is more and more evidence from both genetic studies and from other finds in Arabia and Asia that there might have been multiple expansions earlier than that.”

    If Bretzke’s analysis is correct, then the tools not only testify to the human occupation of Arabia at least 75,000 years earlier than was previously accepted, but Suhailah is also one of the most important prehistoric archaeological sites, not just in the UAE but across the whole of the Arabian Peninsula.

    “It is undisturbed and we can now collect and study the lithics systematically and that will provide an insight into human occupation during the middle Pleistocene,” the 40-year-old archaeologist explains.

    But while Bretzke remains optimistic that field work will enable his team to discover more evidence at Suhailah, he admits that arriving at a more precise date for the assemblage is unlikely.......

    continued

    http://www.thenational.ae/arts-life...ut-of-arabia-the-story-of-early-humanity#full
     
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    Margot2 Banned

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    FYI..................
     

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