An international research team led by Dr Knut Bretzke from Friedrich Schiller University Jena has succeeded in presenting the oldest evidence to date for the systematic production of stone blades on the Arabian Peninsula. These long, narrow stone tools can be dated to an age of 80,000 years using a luminescence method.

The artefacts were found at the Jebel Faya site in the Emirate of Sharjah (United Arab Emirates). The discovery sheds new light on the colonization history of Arabia and thus also on the routes used by Homo sapiens to spread out of Africa. The research results have now been published in the journal "Archaeological and Anthropological Science".

No human remains found so far

"Our results suggest that southern Arabia played a completely different role in the establishment and cultural diversification of Homo sapiens populations in southwest Asia than the north of the peninsula," says Dr Bretzke.

Around 80,000 years ago, a long phase of favourable climatic conditions in Arabia ended, which began 130,000 years ago and during which all regions of the peninsula were populated. During this period, which was characterized by permanent rivers and lake formations, archaeologists find comparable traditions in the production of stone tools in large parts of Arabia.

With the finds from their excavations, Dr Bretzke and his colleagues can now show for the first time that distinct cultural developments were established in northern and southern Arabia with the transition to the subsequent dry phase. The findings thus provide new evidence to better understand and categorize the temporal and spatial course of the spread of early Homo sapiens populations from Africa to Asia.

The global dispersal of Homo sapiens took place in several waves that began no later than 150,000 years ago, says Knut Bretzke. The results now presented indicate that one of the waves took place along the southern edge of the Arabian Peninsula around 80,000 years ago. Thanks to modern DNA analysis methods, an increasingly detailed picture of these waves can gradually be drawn.

A precise spatial-chronological classification of these dispersal processes requires empirical data such as these stone blade finds excavated by archaeologists. Unfortunately, additional comparative DNA analysis is currently not possible in the desert area: "No human remains from the Palaeolithic period have been found in southern Arabia so far," says Knut Bretzke.

His predecessor in the excavations at Jebel Faya, the archaeozoologist Prof. Hans-Peter Uerpmann, began working on this site back in 2003, which was dug up to five metres deep and provides evidence of the settlement history of the region between 210,000 and 10,000 years ago.

Co-operation with Tübingen, Freiburg, Oxford Brookes and local experts

Jena archaeologist Dr Knut Bretzke has been leading field and research projects in the United Arab Emirates and Oman since 2012. The current research team consists of scientists from the universities of Jena, Tübingen, Freiburg im Breisgau and Oxford Brookes (UK) and works closely with experts from the local authorities in the Emirate of Sharjah.