PEOPLING

Al Wusta: a Sapiens in Arabia

more than ~85,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Last glacial

A single finger bone from the Nefoud desert, at least 85,000 years old, is the oldest directly dated Homo sapiens outside Africa and the Levant.

Al Wusta is a site in the Nefoud desert of Saudi Arabia, set beside a freshwater lake now vanished, where a survey recovered an isolated human finger bone, designated Al Wusta-1 and published in 2018. Dated on the bone itself to at least 85,000 years, it constitutes the oldest fossil of Homo sapiens directly dated outside Africa and the Levant. Direct dating removes an assumption ordinarily required, that of contemporaneity between the fossil and the sediment containing it. The associated fauna is predominantly African, in a grassy steppe environment fed by the monsoon; nearby lake beds at Alathar preserve human footprints assigned to an earlier humid phase, the last interglacial, around 120,000 years ago.

Why it matters

The discovery extends eastward the documented range of the first settlements of Homo sapiens outside Africa, previously limited to the Levant in accepted models, and associates it with the advance of monsoon rains into Arabia, several tens of thousands of years before the dispersal that peopled Eurasia.

Dating & uncertainty

The bone was dated by uranium-series, and a Bayesian model crossing independent methods gives about 95,000 to 86,000 years. The Alathar footprints are dated by luminescence to the last interglacial; their attribution to Homo sapiens rests on the morphology of the tracks rather than on skeletal remains, and therefore remains an inference.

Our species’ history as one day

17:26:516 h 33 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day