PEOPLING × ENVIRONMENT

Jebel Faya, an Early Exit Through Arabia?

~125,000 years ago (debated)

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Eemian

Jebel Faya is a rock shelter in the Emirate of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, whose deposits record Palaeolithic settlement across some 125,000 years. Its lowest archaeological horizon, assemblage C, was dated by optically stimulated luminescence to about 127,000 to 123,000 years ago and laid down during a wet phase: the silica bodies that plants leave in the soil, counted through the sequence, show a rising share of C3 grasses at that level. The tool kit resembles the late Middle Stone Age of northeast Africa, from which the excavators argue for a crossing at the mouth of the Red Sea during the last interglacial, when sea level stood low and rainfall was greater. On that reading no technical innovation was needed for the move: what opened was the road, not the tool kit. Later work at the same shelter documents four periods of occupation between about 210,000 and 120,000 years ago.

Why it matters

Departure from Africa is often told as one late exit, around 60,000 years ago, along the rim of the Indian Ocean. Jebel Faya belongs to a group of finds that complicate that account by putting people east of the Red Sea more than 60,000 years before that date, in a peninsula that rainfall opened and closed by turns. Whether those early arrivals left descendants among living populations is a separate question. What the shelter does establish is a region entered again and again, which its excavators read as a refuge for populations rather than a corridor crossed once.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Two readings divide the evidence. The first takes assemblage C, at 127,000 to 123,000 years, with its African affinities, as the trace of Homo sapiens leaving by the southern route during the last interglacial, which puts people in the peninsula by 130,000 years. The second observes that the ages date the sediment, and the resemblance a technical tradition, not a species; the oldest directly dated human fossil of Arabia remains a finger bone from Al Wusta, at 95,000 to 86,000 years. The choice decides whether the southern route was taken during the interglacial or only towards 90,000 years.

Sources

1. Armitage et al. (2011), Science · The Southern Route Out of Africa: Evidence for an Early Expansion of Modern Humans into Arabiadoi:10.1126/science.1199113
2. Bretzke et al. (2013), Quaternary International · The environmental context of Paleolithic settlement at Jebel Faya, Emirate Sharjah, UAEdoi:10.1016/j.quaint.2013.01.028
3. Bretzke et al. (2022), Scientific Reports · Multiple phases of human occupation in Southeast Arabia between 210,000 and 120,000 years agodoi:10.1038/s41598-022-05617-w
4. Groucutt et al. (2018), Nature Ecology & Evolution · Homo sapiens in Arabia by 85,000 years agodoi:10.1038/s41559-018-0518-2

Our species’ history as one day

14:28:349 h 31 min before midnight

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