Lush wetlands in Arabia lured waves of early humans out of Africa
https://www.science.org/content/article/lush-wetlands-arabia-lured-waves-early-humans-out-africa
Source: By Michael Price, Science Magazine.
Excerpt: If you know what to look for in dappled satellite images of desert...the dried-up ghosts of prehistoric lakes pop out against the sand fields of the Arabian Peninsula. Eight years ago, one ancient multihued lake in the Nefud Desert caught the eye of researchers. When scientists excavated its ancient shorelines, a new study reports, they found thousands of stone tools—and evidence that multiple waves of Homo sapiens and their relatives have been migrating across the Arabian interior for at least the past 400,000 years. The results bolster the idea that the periodic greening of this typically harsh desert played a pivotal role in humans’ dispersals out of Africa—and provide the best evidence yet that different groups of humans pulsed out of the continent through the Sinai Peninsula.... digging revealed that the paleolakes at Khall Amayshan 4 had formed and dried up six different times; stone tools were associated with five of those long-lost lakes, dating to 400,000, 300,000, 200,000, 100,000, and 55,000 years ago, the researchers report today in Nature. At another paleolake about 150 kilometers to the east, the Jubbah oasis, they found stone tools in layers dating to 200,000 and 75,000 years ago. ...researchers found fossilized animal bones at many of the dry lakes, suggesting large African animals like hippopotamuses, elephants, and ostriches also followed this green route out of Africa, at least in the wet season.…