Archives: Articles

To traverse across this land for more than 30 minutes, anyone would need a good hat, sturdy shoes, eye shades, a good dose of sun block lotion, and an ample portable supply of fresh water. Those are just the basics. Anything more depends on your planned time, distance and activity. 

This is, as was once also popularly described about the lunar surface, a magnificent desolation. The Great Nefud Desert spreads as an expansive oval shaped region across northern Saudi Arabia for about 70,000 square kilometers, characterized by rocky elevations of rock and sand ranging from 600 to 1,000 meters. Its face moves with shifting red sands, lifted by perpetual strong winds. Isolated red sandstone massifs pockmark the terrain, sculpted by tens of thousands of years of wind action, creating in some places an almost surreal landscape with an otherworldly feel. Summer temperatures can typically range between 30 to 54 degrees Celsius (between 85 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit). It goes without saying that vegetation is sparse, though a significant presence of ephemeral plants can be seen during ‘wet’ years. Despite the desolation here, modest communities of hyenas, jackals, wildcats, ungulates like gazelle, rodents and lizards make it their domicile.

___________________________________

The Nefud. Retlaw Snellac Photography, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic, Wikimedia Commons

___________________________________

Today, humans live here, too. Concentrated primarily in lowland areas such as near the Hejaz Mountains, they manage and inhabit oases where dates, vegetables, barley, and fruits are grown. Indeed, an entire city of about 20,000 people —Jubbah — is completely surrounded by the Nefud. Thus in modern times, people have learned how to live and even thrive in this desert.

___________________________________

Jubba as viewed from space. Public Domain, Wikimeda Commons

___________________________________

Following The Water

The Nefud was not always like this. In recent years, teams of scientists have walked and camped across the region, surveying, sampling, excavating, studying and documenting sites that today present evidence of ancient lakes — in geologic parlance, lacustrine deposits — of which many date back at least several hundred thousand years. One can see the remnants of these ancient lakes by walking across the surface, and especially by viewing the surface from aerial vantage points. They have a different color and consistency from what is often a context of windblown, sandy dunes. In these places, scientists have uncovered fossils and other evidence of water-endowed spaces that, tens of thousands of years ago, were frequented or inhabited by a variety of animal and plant species — ecosystems much like the savannas of Africa we see today. By analyzing the recovered fossils, climate models and records, and the lacustrine sediment records of these ancient lake remnants, scientists have discovered that, at wetter intervals in this desert environment’s arid past, ‘greener’ conditions afforded a critical accommodation for fluctuating communities of life. 

The site of Ti’s al Ghadah in southwestern Nefud presents a perfect example of this. This site is located within an internal depression, or basin. As a 630-meter area ancient paleo-lake deposit outcrop, it has been dated to Pleistocene times and contains a rich array of fossil fauna. 

““Ti’s al Ghadah is one of the most important palaeontological sites in the Arabian Peninsula and it currently represents the only dated collection of middle Pleistocene fossil animals in this part of the world, and includes animals such as elephant, jaguar and water birds,” says Mathew Stewart of the University of South Wales, lead author of a 2019 published study/paper* on the results of taphonomic and zooarchaeological investigations at the site.** Most notably, the paper documented the discovery of stone tools spatially associated with evidence of butchery of animals dated to between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago.

The implications were enormous. There were humans here — or, more accurately, hominins —even before the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens. Said Michael Petraglia, the Ti’s al Ghadah project principal archaeologist and paper co-author, “This makes Ti’s al Ghadah the first, early hominin-associated fossil assemblage from the Arabian Peninsula, demonstrating that our ancestors were exploiting a variety of animals as they wandered into the green interior.”**

__________________________________

A trench at the site of Ti’s al Ghaddah, where a large collection of animal fossils dating to approximately 500,000 years ago have been found. Photo: Palaeodeserts Project, from One Small Arabian Fingerbone, by Huw S. Groucutt, Popular Archaeology July 7, 2018.

__________________________________

Who were these hominins? If not Homo sapiens, then what species? Scientists don’t know the answer to this question, but researchers have discovered other sites that have demonstrated a hominin presence in Arabia. An Nasim, a paleo-lake site in an internal basin like Ti’s al Ghadah within the Nefud, was found to contain Acheulean-type stone tools, along with other fossil fauna, dated to between 350 and 250 ka (thousand years) ago. And the list of new artifact discoveries at similar sites continues to expand, including a remarkable recent discovery at another paleo-lake site in the Nefud known as Al Wusta in 2016………

Bone 

The evidence for hominin occupation around the ancient paleo-lakes of Arabia has been evidenced primarily through stone tool artifact finds, including some proof of usage for processing animals at sites like Ti’s al Ghadah and the discovery of hominin footprints at the Alathar ancient paleolake deposit located within the western Nefud****. But Huw Groucutt, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford who has played a key role in the ongoing research on early humans in the Arabian Peninsula, tells the story of a tantalizing discovery made while investigating sites in the Nefud region:

“We made a quick visit to Al Wusta in 2014, which involved driving down steep dunes to the base of an inter-dunal depression. We noted some stone tools and interesting sediments, but it was late in the day and the sun was getting low in the sky so we did not stay long. It was clearly an interesting site, but we located dozens of interesting sites. It was a place to which we wanted to return at some point, and our team member Prof Nick Drake (Kings College London) kept mentioning the site as something that looked significant. In 2016 we returned to the site with a large interdisciplinary team of international and Saudi scholars. We walked to the far end of the site where we had not previously been, and immediately found numerous animal bones and human-made stone tools on the surface. These were scattered around deposits of lake sediments. Then our colleague, Dr Iyad Zalmout from the Saudi Geological Survey, picked up a small and well preserved fossil.” ***

The find turned out to be a human intermediate phalanx (middle finger bone, the bone from the knuckle toward the end of the finger). By employing a series of chronometric dating techniques, scientists were able to determine the age to be between 95-86 thousand years old.

That made this find rare and remarkable, as it represented the only direct fossil evidence ever found of human habitation in the region as long ago as nearly 90,000 years BP.

__________________________________

The Al Wusta site from the top of a neighboring sand dune. Photo: Ian Candy. From One Small Arabian Fingerbone, by Huw S. Groucutt, Popular Archaeology July 7, 2018.

__________________________________

Lithic artifacts (stone tools) from Al Wusta. Top row: two Levallois flakes, bottom: Levallois core. Photo: Eleanor Scerri. From One Small Arabian Fingerbone, by Huw S. Groucutt, Popular Archaeology July 7, 2018.

__________________________________

The Al-Wusta 1 intermediate phalanx fingerbone. Photo: Ian R. Cartwright. From One Small Arabian Fingerbone, by Huw S. Groucutt, Popular Archaeology July 7, 2018.

__________________________________

What kind of human?

So the phalanx was human, but to what species of human did it belong? Given the age, could it be Neanderthal?

“In many cases, a single fossil would not be enough to determine the species represented,” says Groucutt. “In the case of the finger bone, however, we are lucky in that this bone is very different in Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. In basic terms, Neanderthal intermediate phalanges are relatively shorter and are generally more robust, while those of Homo sapiens are relatively longer and are more gracile. The [measurement] values for the Al Wusta finger bone clearly aligns it with Homo sapiens.”**

Combined with the associated lithics, the case then became a slam-dunk for early modern humans. Many of the Al Wusta site artifacts “feature an emphasis on centripetal Levallois technology”, says Groucutt. This is a manufacturing technique typical of Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age period stone tools, common among finds associated with the early modern human presence at other sites, such as in east and north Africa. 

Dispersal into Green Arabia

Luminescence dating of the sediments at these paleo-lake deposit sites indicates that the dates for the evidence of hominin occupation occurred at a time of higher rainfall in the region, when freshwater lakes, wetlands and rivers formed, inviting development of migration routes for animal species……. and hominins.

“It’s remarkable; every time it was wet, people were there,” says Petraglia from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. “This work puts Arabia on the global map for human prehistory.”***** As more evidence of hominin occupation in the region mounts, scientists are becoming increasingly convinced that the Arabian Peninsula was an important corridor for dispersal of hominins out of Africa into the rest of the world, occurring in different waves and at different times in prehistory. 

And the findings portend the development of a broader and more complex story on human evolution. “Arabia has long been seen as empty throughout the past,” says Groucutt. “Our work shows that we still know so little about human evolution in vast areas of the world and highlights the fact that many surprises are still out there.”*****

Early Desert Monuments

Most archaeologists would say that the Neolithic, a time period between 10,000–4,500 BCE, was best characterized by the beginnings of agriculture and fixed human settlements. These people were not known for their massive architectural achievements and monuments. But a recent excavation led by a team of archaeologists from the University of Western Australia has shed new light on ancient monumental structures dating back over 7,000 years ago, located in present-day Saudi Arabia.

Known as “mustatils,” named after the Arabic word for rectangle, these structures have been the subject of very little research, despite the fact that they are not a recent discovery.

“We started excavating in 2019 as it was the natural progression of our work in the region,” explains Dr. Melissa Kennedy, one of six researchers working on this excavation. “Once we had found out how these structures were formed it was important to be able to date them.”

The team documented hundreds of mustatils aerially, explored almost 40 on the ground, and excavated one, making this the largest study ever conducted on these structures. According to the project’s director Dr. Hugh Thomas, in an interview for Antiquity, over 1,000 mustatils were documented during this project, covering over 200,000 km2 in northwest Arabia.

Dr. Kennedy notes, “Our project started off as purely aerial photography and after viewing our photos of these structures we began to realize that these features were extraordinarily well preserved and that we needed to visit them on the ground. That is when we really began to realize how complex these structures were. Having the aerial photography component of our project is unique, as this allows us to get a different perspective on the archaeological remains we are documenting.”

“We use a variety of techniques; remote sensing, using publicly available satellite imagery, aerial photography, ground survey, and traditional excavation,” she explains. “We also used a lot of digital technologies, such as orthophotography, which is a highly accurate photo mosaic created from hundreds of aerial photographs, and drones. The main challenge with this site is that the structure was made of a type of stone that was highly degraded. It made work in the head of the structure very difficult and very hard to define the chamber.”

This research has more than doubled the total known number of mustatils in Saudi Arabia and established that these structures were far more architecturally complex than previously supposed. Cattle horns and skull parts were uncovered at the site as apparent offerings, confirming assumptions that the structures were built for rituals. Cattle was a vital part of the lives of early humans in the region. Evidence of ‘cattle cults’ have been found in southern Arabia around 900 years later, making it reasonable to conclude that these more ancient mustatils may have been an early example of these cults.

The number and consistency of mustatils in northwest Arabia suggests to researchers that these beliefs were widespread across the region. Given their size and number, they were likely large groups of people coming together and organizing to erect these ritual sites, creating the oldest monumental landscape of this scale ever identified, predating the pyramids of Egypt and Stonehenge in Britain.

“We hope to gain a broader insight into the cultic landscape of northwest Arabia in the late Neolithic,” says Dr. Kennedy. “Particularly, why were these large cultic structures built, what were the beliefs of these people and why did this tradition die out?”

While the findings of the excavation shed light on the ritual traditions and community organization of this region, they also offer more information on the wildlife at the time. Dr. Kennedy explains, “The animal horns are extraordinarily well preserved; they are very important as they give us an insight into the type of cattle being herded in the region in a way that the bones do not.”

“From our perspective, the most significant finds from our work have been from the mustatil and the collective burial we excavated that featured the earliest domestic dog in Arabia,” notes Dr. Kennedy. “For the mustatil, articulating the different facets of these structures has been very important. With the collective burial, we identified multiple phases of use and significant animal offerings. This is some of the earliest evidence for this in northwest Arabia.”

_________________________________

A group of three mustatils. AAKSAU and Royal Commission for AIUIa. From Before Stonehenge: Monument Builders of Arabia, by Arianna Zakrzewski , Popular Archaeology, July 6, 2021

_________________________________

Mustatils from the Harrat Kaybar, Saudi Arabia. AAKSAU and Royal Commission for AIUIAa. From Before Stonehenge: Monument Builders of Arabia, by Arianna Zakrzewski , Popular Archaeology, July 6, 2021

_________________________________

Mustatils are not the only early stone structures that have recently been discovered on the Arabian landscape. Dated as far back as the Late Neolithic, monumental structures now penned as “desert kites” have been photographed, surveyed and examined across the landscape in southern Jordan and northwest Saudi Arabia. Although 700 to 800 of these surface formations were known to exist 20 years ago, investigators now account for at least 6,500 and counting. They are described as ‘kites’ because, when viewed from above, many of them resemble the shapes of children’s kites with streamers that were popular on the market years ago. According to researchers’ interpretations as documented in recently published study reports******, these structures were actually massive traps constructed by Neolithic and early Bronze Age people to methodically lead or force their animal prey to natural precipices or human-made pits where they would fall to their deaths. 

“Regardless of form,” states an October 24, 2022 press release from HK Strategies and the Royal Commission for ALULa****** “all kites in the region have driving lines of low stone walls that converge to funnel animals towards a trap such as a pit or precipice. On average, the driving lines of the AlUla kites are approximately 200m long. However, elsewhere they can stretch for kilometres.”

“While kites recorded in the AlUla region [in northwest Saudi Arabia] tended to funnel prey towards a sudden precipice,” continues the press release, “kites elsewhere often end in concealed pits, in which hundreds of animals could be killed during a single hunt.”****** 

______________________________________

A kite in Khaybar. These ancient hunting traps were named ‘kites’ by aviators in the 1920s because, from above, they resemble old-fashioned children’s kites. (Diaa Albukaai and Kévin Guadagnini, Khaybar Longue Durée Archaeological Project/RCU/Afalula/CNRS)

______________________________________

In other research, archaeologists of the University of Western Australia (UWA), reporting findings in the journal The Holocene in January, 2022, suggest that people who lived in ancient north-west Arabia built long-distance ‘funerary avenues’ – major pathways flanked by thousands of burial monuments that linked oases and pastures.******* 

“The existence of the funerary avenues suggests that complex social horizons existed 4,500 years ago across a huge swathe of the Arabian Peninsula,” states the press release.******* 

The researchers applied satellite imagery analysis and aerial photography, and then ground survey work and excavations to further identify and study the funerary avenues over at least 160,000 square km, recording more than 17,800 ‘pendant’-shaped tombs in the AlUla and Khaybar areas. They found that the highest numbers of funerary avenues were located near water resources, and appeared to be created for travel between oases. Others appeared to have been used for moving domestic animal herds into pasture areas during periods of rain.

__________________________________________

Pendant tombs and funerary avenues discovered in north-west Saudi Arabia. Courtesy Royal Commission for AlUla.

__________________________________________ 

Ancient Civilizations of the Incense Road

Few activities spurred the creation of great ancient cities more than the Incense Trade Route, otherwise known as the Incense Road. It was a far-reaching ancient trade network linking the Mediterranean world with eastern and southern producers of incense, spices and other luxury goods, ending at Mediterranean ports in the Levant and Egypt, Northeast Africa, Arabia and India. It powered the magnificent rise and florescence of monumental civilizations on the Arabian Peninsula, which reached their height between the 7th century BC and the 2nd century AD.

One archaeologist in particular was inspired to explore the hidden secret of these monumental cities during the 1950’s and 60’s………….

Saba’s Desert Jewel

No other ancient site in Yemen, a country that skirts the southern coast of Arabian Peninsula, excited Wendell Phillips more than the prospect of excavating at Ma’rib, the capital of the ancient Sabaeans (people of the Kingdom of Saba) and thought by many biblical scholars as the likely residence of the famed 10th century Queen of Sheba. As an American adventurer and archaeologist, it was among his plans from the beginning to explore the possibility of obtaining permission to excavate at the site, but the area was regarded as forbidden to Westerners because of tribal unrest. Approval and support from Imam Ahmed, the King of Yemen, however, could make all the difference, and this is exactly what Phillips attempted to obtain. An audience with the King was finally realized, resulting in approval for Phillips and his team to push forward to Marib for this, the first excavation by a Western expedition to Ma’rib in over 60 years. Efforts began in earnest during the 1950’s.

Getting to Ma’rib required an uneasy journey northward across the dunes through what for Westerners was largely unexplored land. But once there, Phillips was overwhelmed by the site. Phillips knew that local Yemenis had already dug about 70 feet down at one point at the site to recover stone blocks for a fortress and houses, encountering cultural layers as they went. But he knew that excavating the entire city would be far too much to tackle at this point, so the team focused their efforts on what was clearly the most prominently visible feature of the city—the Mahram Bilqis, or Temple of Awam, otherwise known by the ancients as the Temple of Almaqah, dedicated to the moon god who was the principal deity of Ma’rib.

Only the tops of eight massive pillars and the upper part of an oval-shaped wall could be seen jutting above the windblown sand at first, but as they dug, painstakingly removing tons of sand and soil with a workforce of scores of workmen, they eventually uncovered a large hall with monumental pillars, stairways, inscriptions, and bronze and alabaster sculptures. In some places the wall of the temple itself, 13.5 feet thick and constructed of fitted ashlar masonry, still stood to a height of more than 27 feet above the temple’s excavated entrance hall. Adjacent to the temple they uncovered evidence of a mausoleum and tombs similar to what they had previously unearthed at the ancient site of Timna to the north.

These discoveries were already magnificent by any measure, and there was potentially much more to unearth. But developing tribal tensions spelled danger for the team long before they could achieve their objectives, and they were forced to leave the site, never to return as an expedition under Phillips’ direction again. Their sudden, hasty exit meant leaving their equipment and archaeological discoveries behind, though their written records were later published in scholarly reports. Phillips died in 1975, never having realized his hopes of returning to Ma’rib to finish the work.

Return to Ma’rib

It wasn’t until 1998, more than two decades later, when renewed excavations began at Ma’rib. Invited by the government of Yemen to resume excavations where her brother left off in 1952, Merilyn Phillips Hodgson took the ball and ran with it. With more than fifty workmen and an international team that included archaeologists, epigraphists, architects, and other specialists involved in what turned out to be a multi-year expedition lasting nine seasons, their discoveries were no less sensational than those made decades earlier. Focusing on the Awam Temple, hundreds of new inscriptions were recovered, and for the first time, the interior of the oval precinct walls of the complex was uncovered to a depth of sixteen feet. Features of its main Peristyle Hall and Annex areas were uncovered and defined, and more insight to the construction and occupational chronology or sequence for the Temple was acquired.

“The earliest material cultural remains excavated in the Awam complex date to the eighth century BC,” wrote archaeologists Zaydoon Zaid and Mohammed Maraqten in a report of their findings from the Temple complex. “Inscriptions mark the beginning of the history of occupation of the site.” Add to this “a recently discovered but as yet unpublished inscribed block that served as the base of a statue mentions a dedication by the Shab of Saba and is dated according to the Himyaritic era (i.e. 115 or 110 BC) to the late fourth century AD. It confirms the continuity of the main function of the temple as a sacred place……..The architectural sequence for the Awam temple would therefore seem to span a period from the first millennium BC to the late fourth century AD.”********

The results of the renewed excavations further confirmed what Phillips had, decades before, concluded about the significance of the site. In terms of the construction date chronology, continuity of use, opulence and monumental scale, the Awam Temple was, according to Zaid, clearly “one of the most important monuments of the Sabaean period, which doubtless composed the religious center of the city of Ma’rib and of ancient South Arabia as a whole”.******** It bespoke a civilization that, in its time, rivaled the great civilizations to its north, west and east, for it was in Ma’rib that the Sabaean kings made their capital, building massive irrigation works such as the Ma’rib dams, (the ruins of which are still visible) and other monumental buildings, made possible by the wealth brought in through the incense trade routes and extensive maritime connections as a seafaring people. It was a flourishing culture for more than a thousand years.

Was it here, at the Awam Temple, that the biblical Queen of Sheba worshipped? As far as scholars know, the temple construction chronology post-dates the time period in which many biblical scholars suggest she lived, the 10th century BCE. Was there an earlier temple on this spot? Further excavation may shed additional light on the question. “One of our main objectives is to continue excavating inside the Oval areal, where we think we will find a lot of answers that will help to establish and complete the occupational history of the site,” says Zaid.

Zaid hopes to one day return to finish where the last set of seasons left off, but the political situation and unrest mitigates the possibilities.

He tempers some sadness with wishful anticipation. “Yemen is a unique land, something like an open museum,” he says. “When you travel in Yemen, talk to the kind Yemeni people, visit the old cities and the amazing bazaars—you would think that time has stopped. Things are still much the same as they were hundreds of years ago. We hope that the situation in Yemen will develop in a positive way, so that the people of Yemen will have their peace and go back to normal life and, of course, allow us to go back to continue our work at the temple.”

Phillips, no doubt, if he were alive, would be in the front of the pack.

__________________________________

View of the impressive excavated staircase in ‘Area A’ of the Awam Temple at Ma’rib. Excavations have revealed that the Temple Complex includes several major architectural components: The Oval Wall, enclosing most of an open-air Oval Precinct; The Peristyle Hall with thirty-two pillars surrounding a large courtyard; The Annex Area along the north-east side of the Peristyle Hall and parallel to the eight monumental pillars; A large courtyard area, Area A, building 1, paved passage and staircases; A mausoleum adjacent to the south-east exterior of the Oval Wall; and a cemetery to the south-west of the Oval Wall. Courtesy Zaydoon Zaid and the AFSM. From The Real Indy, Popular Archaeology, December 20, 2014 

__________________________________

View of the excavated Peristyle Hall and Annex area at Ma’rib. Courtesy Zaydoon Zaid and the AFSM. From The Real Indy, Popular Archaeology, December 20, 2014 

__________________________________

The Temple pillars as seen from inside the Oval Wall at Ma’rib. Courtesy Zaydoon Zaid and the AFSM. From The Real Indy, Popular Archaeology, December 20, 2014 

__________________________________

The Treasures of AlUla

Located about 190 miles north of Medina in northwest Saudi Arabia, the city of AlUla, set within a valley oasis of palms and citrus groves, comprises a population of just over 5400 residents. Though relatively small in terms of population and infrastructure, this place has nonetheless been the focus of national attention by the country’s government to expand and develop its historical, cultural, and natural attractions with the goal of making it a super-magnet for international tourism. There is good reason for this. The AlUla region is richly endowed with archaeological sites that date back to the Bronze Age, but most prolifically through the first millennium BC into the early centuries AD, when Arabian spices and other goods were traded up along the routes of the Incense Road, enriching the ‘middle men’ cites and oases along its route and giving rise to wealthy and monumental communities. 

“Already, well over 100 archaeologists are working across AlUla during fieldwork seasons and projects, shedding light on many past eras and revealing the depth and richness of AlUla’s cultural heritage,” says Dr Abdulrahman Alsuhaibani, Acting Executive Director of Collections at the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) and associate professor of archaeology at King Saud University.*******. “Our teams [have been] uncovering more than 10,000 artifacts per year. Our storage units are growing rich with wonderful finds – from the minute (for example, a unique leaf-shaped mother-of-pearl pendant found in a burial site dating to between 4300 and 3500 BCE) to the monumental (2.5m-tall statues of broad-shouldered kings excavated at Dedan dated to between the 5th and 3rd centuries BCE).”******* Simultaneously, resources are being mobilized to ensure the safe preservation, conservation and storage of the treasures they uncover, as well as the treasures that have already been unearthed and exhibited to the world. Facilities are already slated to be built that will showcase this cultural heritage and house the institutions established to administer the projects and promote AlUla as a major world cultural attraction for tourism. Toward this end, Alsuhaibani and his colleagues plan to “work with the best cultural institutions and businesses, large or small, around the world to place RCU and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the forefront of the community.”*******

Since 2005, Alsuhaibani himself has excavated at sites that are revealing more evidence of the ancient kingdoms of Dadan and Lihyan. Beginning around 600 years BC, a capital city built and ruled by a succession of dynastic kings arose in UlUla, The oasis supported agriculture and herding, the city’s economic foundation, but the movement of precious commodities of trade from southern Arabia — products like frankincense, resin, and other aromatics — stopped here to be further transported to distant locations in the Mediterranean. The ‘middle-men’ businesses that profited from this activity enriched the Dadanites, and the successive dynasties of the Lihyanites. 

____________________________________

A Dadanite inscription. Zunkir, (CC BY-SA 4.0), Wikimedia Commons

____________________________________

Dadanite bas relief of a lion. Sanctuaire de Dadan (al-Khuraybah), al-‘Ula. Daté des Ve-Ier siècles av. J.-C. Sur bloc de grès rouge. Présenté à l’Institut du Monde Arabe de Paris pour l’exposition sur Al-‘Ula, prêt du Musée du département d’archéologie de Riyad, université du roi Saud. Zunkir, (CC BY-SA 4.0), Wikimedia Commons

____________________________________

Consistent with the pattern for the development of all great civilizations, trade and economic activity brought with it new ideas and influences in art, writing, and other cultural developments typical of prosperous communities. Archaeologists have unearthed thousands of artifacts that attest to this, including inscriptions, figurines, statuary, rock art, and architectural remains. Among the most remarkable architectural finds were tombs, meticulously and artfully carved into the sandstone cliffs that characteristically define the scenic desert landscape. Most notable are the “lion tombs”. These tombs were carved adjacent to each other along the cliff face, decorated with reliefs of lions. Even more remarkable in the AlUla area are the massive, elaborate rock-cut tombs created by the Nabataeans………. 

Hegra 

Otherwise known as Mada’in Saleh, the spectacular remains of ancient Hegra can arguably be said to eclipse the visual impact of the many other unique visual features of AlUla. Much like the rock-cut constructions of its sister city of Petra far to the north in present-day Jordan, at Hegra the ancient Nabataeans created a city of tombs and other edifices primarily out of the natural stone outcrops of the landscape. And although Hegra boasts far fewer carved tombs than Petra, most of them are better preserved, some never completed, and they feature a significantly greater abundance of inscriptions on or near their facades. With columns topped with capitals, triangular pediments, tomb entablatures, crowns featuring sets of stairs, carved sphinxes, eagles, griffins, Medusa-like masks, these tombs show the affluence and art and architectural influence mix of classical Greece, Rome, Egypt and Persia — a visual testament to the convergence of the great civilizations and cultures that define its world context. It is no wonder. Hegra, like Petra to its north, constituted a critical trade and stopping point through which commercial and other representatives of world civilizations and cultures passed on the Incense Road.

For archaeologists, the inscriptions have provided a means to date the tombs, the oldest determined to have been created around 1 BC and the most recent at about 70 AD. They have also cracked open a window on the people, although the picture is far from understood at this point. Intriguingly, however, they do offer a glimpse on the great diversity of people who occupied and traversed through the city, including not just Hegrites, but Moabites, Syrians, Jews and many other kinds of people. But the monumental tombs themselves reflected only a small slice of the diversity and economic status of these people — these tombs, just as in most ancient civilizations, were likely elaborate resting places for the wealthy, powerful, and societal elite. 

_________________________________

Qasr al Farid, tomb in the archaeological site Mada’in Saleh, AlUla. Richard.hargas, (CC BY-SA 4.0), Wikimedia Commons

_________________________________

Above and below: Tombs at Mada’in Saleh. Tom and Linda Anderson, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

_________________________________

Who were they?

Historically speaking, the Nabataeans began as a nomadic, pastoral tribe, moving in the Arabian desert by following natural water resources needed for sustenance. They did not emerge as a notable civilization and polity until between the 4th and 2nd centuries BCE, when their kingdom was built around the lucrative trading network of the Incense Road, finally binging them wealth and some influence within the ancient world.

Once they became a power in their own right, the Nabataeans allied with the Hasmoneans in battle with the Seleucid monarchs. But they soon became local rivals of this Judaean dynasty, and Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus invaded and occupied Nabataea, followed by the successful attack by Nabatean king Obodas I, who defeated the Hasmonean forces near Gaulane and destroying the Judean army in about 90 BC. Beginning in 32 BC, under Herod the Great, conflict between Nabataea and Judea continued through a series of back-and-forth battles, with Herod’s forces usually gaining the upper hand.

As an ally of the Roman Empire during the 1st centuries BC and AD, the Nabataean kingdom flourished, Its influence expanding through Arabia to the Red Sea and as far south as present-day Yemen. During its heyday, Petra, the famous rock-cut remains of which lie in southern Jordan, exemplified the center of their power.

Despite its spectacular archaeological remains, however, relatively little is known about the Nabataeans — at least, in comparison to what we know today about the great civilizations that surrounded them. But archaeologists and other scientists are busy at work investigating the sites, and it is hoped that much more will be known about these people in time through careful and continuous efforts. The authorities and scientists at AlUla hope to make this happen, preserving what they find for the future. “We are pursuing several projects to ensure the safe preservation of the treasures in our custody,” says Alsuhaibani. “As ambitious as we are to show the world our archaeological discoveries, this is also a time to be meticulous. We are careful with our riches to ensure that they can continue to be researched and enjoyed by future generations.”*******

Arabia, prehistoric and ancient, never really was lost — just hidden. It only awaits scholars and scientists like Alsuhaibani to finally bring it to light.

____________________________________

*https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379118308138#!

**https://popular-archaeology.com/article/earliest-hominin-migrations-into-the-arabian-peninsula-required-no-novel-adaptations/

***Huw Groucutt, One Small Arabian Finger Bone, Popular Archaeology, July 7, 2018.

****https://popular-archaeology.com/article/stepping-out/

*****https://popular-archaeology.com/article/prehistoric-climate-change-repeatedly-channelled-human-migrations-across-arabia/

Thomas, H., Kennedy, M., Dalton, M., McMahon, J., Boyer, D., & Repper, R. (2021). The mustatils: Cult and monumentality in Neolithic north-western Arabia. Antiquity, 95(381), 605-626. doi:10.15184/aqy.2021.51  https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2021.51

 ******‘The Use of Desert Kites as Hunting Mega Traps: Functional Evidence and Potential Impacts on Socioeconomic and Ecological Spheres’ by Rémy Crassard, et al, published in Journal of World Prehistory. Project sponsored by CNRS and French National Research Agency.

‘Kites of AlUla County and the Ḥarrat ‘Uwayriḍ, Saudi Arabia’ by Rebecca Repper, et al, published in Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy. Project sponsored by RCU.

‘New Arabian desert kites and potential proto-kites extend the global distribution of hunting mega-traps’ by Olivier Barge, et al, published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Khaybar data in this article results from the Khaybar Longue Durée Archaeological Project. 

******* Massive Late Neolithic animal traps in Arabia have archaeologists mobilized, October 24, 2022, Popular Archaeology Magazine, HK Strategies and the Royal Commission for ALULa press release of October 24, 2022.

********Mysterious ancient tombs reveal 4,500-year-old highway network in north-west Arabia, Royal Commission for AlUla , January 10, 2022.

********* Zaid, Zaydoon and Maraqten, Mohammed, The Peristyle Hall: remarks on the history of construction based on recent archaeological and epigraphic evidence of the AFSM expedition to the Awam temple in Marib, Yemen, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, Vol. 38, 2008

********** Abdulrahman Alsuhaibani, Rediscovering Ancient Arabia, Popular Archaeology, 1/14/2022.

__________________________________

Recent decades have seen remarkable discoveries that have uncovered evidence of soft tissue forms of hominins and later human ancestors. More specifically, beyond fossilized bones and skeletons, we now have fossilized impressions of hominin and human feet, opening up a new window on prehistoric human behavior. Here, Popular Archaeology issues an anthology of four major articles published on some of these incredible recent discoveries. The first story began over three million years ago………….

_______________________________

Laetoli: The Unfolding Story

Laetoli, Tanzania — September, 2015 — A small team of scientists and skilled excavators crouched face-down into shallow square 2 x 2 meter test pits they had carefully and methodically dug into the dry volcanic sand of an African savanna landscape. They were isolated here, with the only nearest sign of civilization, a small village called Endulen, about 50 minutes away by car. The air was almost unbearably hot, typical of the long 7-month dry season in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a region of low-rolling light yellow-brown tropical grasslands textured with a mix of acacias, candelabra trees, jackalberry trees, whistling thorns, Bermuda grass, baobabs, and elephant grass. For millions of years, what is today the Conservation Area has been home to thousands of different species of animals, including the better-known varieties such as lions, cheetahs, hyenas, and jackals, with wildebeest, zebras and gazelles passing through. This team, led by Dr. Marco Cherin of the University of Perugia, Italy, was revealing some very ancient footprints — more than 3 million years old, to be more precise. They represented animals still common to the African landscape today, like equids, rhinoceros, giraffe, and guineafowl. 

But most tantalizing were the remarkably preserved footprints of a special animal.

A human.

Or something very akin to a human.

It’s certainly not the first time scientists have found traces of prehistoric humans, or extinct human-like relatives, in this region. About 50 km to the north of where Cherin and his colleagues were digging, scientists discovered some of the first fossilized evidence of an ancient ancestral human species, or hominin, over 55 years ago at Olduvai Gorge, radically changing the direction of human evolution research; and only 150 m to the north, another iconic site in the Laetoli area revealed remarkably well-preserved human-like 3.66-million-year-old footprints in 1978. But for Cherin, the 2015 find was perhaps the greatest discovery of his life, and for good reason. The footprints he and his colleagues were now uncovering provided potentially revelatory new answers to questions that scientists have debated for decades. 

Rare Finds

Discoveries at Laetoli began around 1935, when the renowned paleontologist Louis Leakey was clued into investigating the area. Leakey recovered several mammalian fossils and one left lower canine fossil tooth which later proved to be that of a hominin. Then, in 1938 and 1939, German explorer Ludwig Kohl-Larsen found hominin molars, premolars and incisors in the same area, further revealing the area’s potential. But it wasn’t until 1974 when the discovery of yet another hominin premolar generated renewed interest in the area, drawing the renowned British paleontologist Mary Leakey to investigate sites in the area, revealing new fossils representing 23 hominin individuals, including a fragmentary infant skeleton, dated to between 3.46 and 3.76 million years old.

The dating and examination of the fossil remains suggested they were from Australopithecus afarensis, the hominin species made famous by Donald Johanson with his discovery of the fossil skeletal remains of ‘Lucy’ in 1974 in the Hadar region of Ethiopia. The Lucy find was dated to about 3.2 mya (million years ago), and today scientists broadly accept a date range of between 3.85 and 2.95 mya for the Au. afarensis species. 

____________________________________

(A) Location of the study area in northern Tanzania. (B) Location of Laetoli within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, about 50 km south of Olduvai Gorge. (C) Plan view of the area of Laetoli Locality 8 (Sites G and S). Site G was the earlier, 1978 site. Site S is the current site. Figure: Giovanni Boschian. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

___________________________________________________

Fossils were not all that were found in the Laetoli area, however. Laetoli is perhaps best known today for its ancient animal trackways created in ash laid down millions of years ago by the eruption of a nearby volcano, the ash having transformed into a volcanic tuff over time. To date, mammal, bird, and insect prints and trails have been found in 18 out of 33 specific locations. But perhaps the most sensational find turned out to be the ancient 88 ft.- long trackway consisting of 70 footprints embedded in an excavated layer of 3.66 mya volcanic tuff — a trackway that exhibited the clear signs of something quite human. Paul Abell, a member of Leakey’s team, first encountered them in 1978 after Leakey and her team uncovered a series of other animal tracks imprinted in the same ancient tuff beginning in 1976. The new finds made headlines in science venues worldwide, and initiated a subsequent series of studies, the results of which began to shed additional light on defining the Au. afarensis hominin species, which by 1978 had already been suggested by many scientists to be a forerunner to humans on the biological evolution spectrum.

Careful examination and documentation of the trackway revealed three individuals walking together in the same direction at the same time. They were of different body sizes, with the largest individual walking side-by-side with the smallest, and an intermediate-sized individual walking just behind the largest. All walked with a human-like speed. The shape of their feet and the configuration of the toes were consistent with what was known about the feet of Au. afarensis, fossil remains of which were found in the same area and sediment layer as the footprints. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from this discovery was the affirmation that Au. afarensis was bipedal, and walked much like a modern human — a gait where the heel strikes the ground first followed by a push-off from the toes. Secondly, the footprint trackway spacing indicated a short stride, suggesting the individuals were small in stature, or at least short-legged — also consistent with the general size determination for Au. afarensis at the time. 

Where was this small group of early hominins going and why? To find a more friendly location in which to sojourn? To find a new watering hole? To date, there is no evidence to confidently suggest any answers. But information gleaned from study of the site has given some clues about the environment and the circumstances. It is clear that they were treading this path shortly after the ash fell and settled over the landscape following a nearby volcanic eruption. Much like mud, the ash was still fresh with the wetness bestowed upon it by a recent light rainfall, producing a consistency good for making impressions. The eruptions had to have been rather frequent, as subsequent layers of ash fall covered the footprints and thus preserved them before they were superimposed by any other subsequent activity, such as other animals. Other prints uncovered in the same tuff layers indicated the presence of another twenty different animal species that existed at the time, including hyenas, baboons, wild cats, giraffes, rhinos, wild boars, gazelles, several kinds of antelope, buffaloes, extinct elephant relatives, birds and hares. The sediments also showed that the climate was a little wetter than the present day.

Were these hominins toolmakers? No artifacts were found, at least within the same sediment beds that contained the trackway, and no artifacts have been found to date that could be associated with Au. afarensis anywhere else in the Laetoli area—still consistent with current thinking that afarensis was not a toolmaker, unlike later hominins.

______________________________

Laetoli footprints cast. Momotarou2012, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, Wikimedia Commons

_______________________________________

Above: Three dimensional scans of experimental footprints and a Laetoli footprint.  Contours are 1 mm.

A) Contour map of modern human footprint (Subject 6) walking with a normal, extended limb gait and side view of normal, extended limb footprint.

B) Contour map of modern human footprint (Subject 6) walking with a BKBH (ape-like bent-knee, bent-hip) gait and side view of BKBH print.

C) Contour map of Laetoli footprint (G1-37) and side view of Laetoli footprint (G1-37). Note the difference in heel and toe depths between modern humans walking with extended and BKBH gaits. Laetoli has similar toe relative to heel depths as the modern human extended limb print.

This is the earliest direct evidence of kinematically human-like bipedalism currently known, and it shows that extended limb bipedalism evolved long before the appearance of the genus Homo. Since extended-limb bipedalism is more energetically economical than ape-like bipedalism, energy expenditure was likely an important selection pressure on hominin bipeds by 3.6 Ma.  Image: Raichlen DA, Gordon AD, Harcourt-Smith WEH, Foster AD, Haas WR Jr  Image and text from Raichlen DA, Gordon AD, Harcourt-Smith WEH, Foster AD, Haas WR Jr (2010) Laetoli Footprints Preserve Earliest Direct Evidence of Human-Like Bipedal Biomechanics. PLoS ONE 5(3): e9769. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009769. Republished from Laetoli: The Unfolding Story, Popular Archaeology Magazine

_______________________________________________________

Finding Chewie

As efforts in the ongoing exploration of human origins research would have it, the story at Laetoli did not end with the 1978 discoveries and their subsequent study. But it wasn’t until 2014, more than 35 years later, that the next major chapter in the area began to unfold. Plans to construct a new field museum in the Laetoli area tasked Fidelis T. Masao and Elgidius B. Ichumbaki of the University of Dar es Salaam and their co-workers to undertake a systematic survey and excavation (known as a cultural heritage impact assessment, a process required by Tanzanian law) before land preparation and construction could begin. Masao, long a well-known player in paleoanthropological research in Tanzania, and his colleagues asked Marco Cherin⁽¹⁾ of the School of Paleoanthropology of the University of Perugia, including researchers from the Universities of Rome, Florence and Pisa, to join them in 2015. A total of 62 randomly placed test pits were methodically and carefully excavated with the objective of exposing and examining the ‘Footprint Tuff’, the same sediments in which the Laetoli footprints were found in 1978. The first phase involved the use of small shovels to quickly remove the overlying modern topsoil (approximately 20–25 cm), graduating to lighter excavation tools such as trowels and pickaxes to dig into the underlying layers until they reached the first signs of the Footprint Tuff. From this point, Cherin and his team knew that excavation had to proceed with the highest level of caution, using small wooden tools, dental tools, small trowels and brushes. 

What they had hoped to find began to emerge. In this case, fourteen hominin footprints, along with those of other animals, eventually took form in three test pits. According to Cherin and his colleagues, the hominin prints represented a single individual walking to create, in this exposure, a trackway of 32 meters in an SSE to NNW direction— the very same direction as those uncovered at the earlier Laetoli footprint site in 1978. And the tracks bore a remarkable similarity to those of the earlier site, calculated with a similar walking speed. But there was one major exception — these footprints were significantly larger. Cherin and colleagues determined that they represented an individual with large relative stature and mass, standing 165 cm in height. By the end of the September 2015 field season, they discovered a second hominin trackway, this one made by a smaller individual. But the apparent size of the first, larger individual, was a surprise, particularly given the assessment that this person, like those who made the trackways at the earlier Laetoli site, was likely a member of the Au. afarensis species, a species generally thought to be significantly smaller in stature than hominins that evolved later in the human evolutionary spectrum.  “We nicknamed him Chewie, after the famous Chewbacca of Star Wars,” said Cherin. 

All footprints, including those of other animals, were very carefully cleaned using soft brushes, revealing greater detail and to better measure, photograph, trace and map them for continuing study. Apart from the hominin footprints, the animal tracks provided critical information about the kind of environment where Chewie made his home — a mosaic of grassland, woodland, dry tropical bushland, and riverine forest — much like the savanna environment that exists there today. 

_____________________________________________

Fidelis T. Masao (University of Dar es Salaam) (right) coordinates the digging operations with the Masai assistants. Photo Sofia Menconero. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

___________________________________

 Four hominin tracks photographed at sunset in test-pit L8 at Laetoli Site S. Photo Raffaello Pellizzon. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

___________________________________

Getting to Know Afarensis

The footprint finds at the new site brought up the count by two hominin individuals, making it now five individuals for whom evidence has been found at Laetoli. Five individuals walking on the same ancient, soft, wet ash surface at the same time, 3.66 million years ago, long before the genus Homo, the genus to which modern day humans belong, walked the earth. 

Were they all part of the same group?

Cherin and his colleagues think so.

According to Cherin, their careful study of the geology and morphology of the area, including the detailed characteristics of the newly exposed stratigraphic sequence, provided “a very good margin of confidence”* that the newly discovered tracks belonged to the same surface as that found in the Footprint Tuff at the earlier site. “They were walking together on the same paleosurface, in the same direction and with the same speed,” says Cherin. “This allows us to consider the five individuals (the two in our [new] ‘Site S’ and the three in the 1970s ‘Site G’) as part of the same social group of Australopithecus afarensis.”

There may be some room for doubt, however. “The correlation between Site G and Site S cannot be absolutely indisputable, at least for the time being, because the original profile [of Site G] could not be examined directly,” state the study authors in the subject report. Moreover,  “it must be pointed out that extra-fine correlation between outcrops, even in a depositional environment with moderate lateral variability like the Footprint Tuff deposition area, can be affected by major uncertainty.”*  

Nonetheless, footprint evidence like this can potentially say much about the footprint makers. “Footprints are a rare and unique form of evidence of our ancestors, both physical and behavioral,” says Briana Pobiner, a key paleoanthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.  “Fossils can tell us about the general body size and shape, but with footprints we can learn about how fast ancient people walked or ran and what kinds of social groups they were in.”

Pobiner speaks from experience. She was part of a team that investigated more than 400 footprints uncovered at another site in Tanzania called Engare Sero. Here, modern humans — Homo sapiens — walked across a surface of ash laid down between 5,000 and 19,000 years ago, spewed out from the nearby volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai. The study of those prints revealed that some of the individuals were moving at a jogging pace, and one set of prints suggested the possibility of a broken toe. Other prints revealed what seemed to be a group of about a dozen associated people composed mostly of women and children, suggesting a particular social unit of people, or at least part of one, traveling southwest to an unknown destination. In this place, Pobiner shared some of the same feelings Cherin, Masao and others must have felt at Leotoli: “The opportunity to literally walk next to the footprints of an ancient human, to hundreds of them, was haunting,” Pobiner continued. “They were RIGHT THERE, in the same spot I was standing, but 19,000 years ago. They walked where I walked. What did they see? What were they thinking? The scenery today is stark and beautiful, with the volcano towering in the background; it’s hot, dry, and dusty. Was it the same back then? It’s hard not to feel an eerie, emotional connection doing research on human footprints.”  

Laetoli and Egare Sero are not the only places discoveries like this have taken place — Koobi Fora, another famous hominin site in East Africa, features hominin footprints that are 1.5 mllion years old, the Willandra Lakes site in Australia revealed 700 human footprints that are 20,000 years old, and in South Africa two sites along the coast have yielded prints dated as much as 120,000 years ago.

But all of these sites are rare when compared to the total fossil and archaeological record bearing on hominins.

What distinguishes the Laetoli discoveries from others, according to Cherin and colleagues, are the possible new implications the latest finds might have for understanding one of humankind’s earliest ancestral lineages, the Australopithecines, and more specifically, Au. afarensis. More than behavior and movement, the tracks at Site S may have revealed something about size and social structure.

“The remarkable stature of Chewie (165 cm) is the highest ever estimated for any australopithecine and is similar to average values of more derived hominin species, such as Homo erectus or Homo sapiens itself,” says Cherin. “This demonstrates that the increase of stature did not occur along a linear trend during human evolution and is not directly linked to encephalization.”

In other words, increase in height and/or body size does not necessarily conform to the traditional thinking that hominins like Homo erectus, a more derived or ‘advanced’ extinct human species that emerged later in the fossil record, were the first “tall” or more standard-sized humans, correlating with a similar increase in brain size. 

On the other hand, was Chewie an aberration among his species peer group? After all, today we know there are some unusually tall people among our own world population, deviating from the norm. Did Cherin and his colleagues simply come across one of those deviants among the Australopithecines? The discovery of additional tracks laid down during the same time horizon in East Africa and in other locations would of course likely shed additional light and provide evidence to either support or detract from Cherin’s tentative conclusion. 

Dimorphism and Gorillas

The Site S tracks revealed some additional implications, according to Cherin.  

“Given the impressive stature, Chewie was very likely a large male,” he suggests. “Another three Laetoli individuals have a stature of about 130-145 cm, thus being probably females (or sub-adults). The smallest individual (113 cm) was probably a juvenile. This social structure (i.e., one large male with more than one smaller female) is similar to that of the living gorilla, in which one male has a “harem” of smaller mates with their cubs. This similarity allows us to hypothesize that Au. afarensis may have been a polygynous species.”

The published study report summarizes the rationale for his thinking:

The impressive record of bipedal tracks from Laetoli Locality 8 (Site G and the new Site S) may open a window on the behaviour of a group of remote human ancestors, envisaging a scenario in which at least five individuals (G1, G2, G3, S1 and S2) were walking in the same time frame, in the same direction and at a similar moderate speed. This aspect must be evaluated in association with the pronounced body-size variation within the sample, which implies marked differences between age ranges and a considerable degree of sexual dimorphism in Au. afarensis. Significant implications about the social structure of this stem hominin species derive from these physical and behavioural characteristics, suggesting that reproductive strategies and social structure among at least some of the early bipedal hominins were closer to a gorilla-like model than to chimpanzees or modern humans.*

Some scientists, no doubt, have and will continue to take issue with the conclusions. Human evolution research, by its very nature, has always been a hotbed for debate, and continuing research and discovery has historically changed what we know about human evolution, new studies and finds either debunking or confirming previous hypotheses or conclusions. But for now, Cherin’s conclusions remain an intriguing possibility.

__________________________________________

 Minimum and maximum estimated statures of selected fossil hominins by species and locality over time for the interval 4–1 million years. Figure Marco Cherin. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

____________________________________

 Australopithecus afarensis: Defining a species

The story of the discovery of Australopithecus afarensis actually began with Donald Johanson and a team of scientists and excavators at a remote site in the area of Hadar, Ethiopia on November 24, 1974. Here, while surveying and mapping the area, Johanson spotted a forearm bone, skull bone, femur, lower jaw bone, pelvis, and some rib bones at the surface, identifying them as those of a hominin. This sparked two weeks of excavation resulting in the recovery of several hundred more bone fragments that constituted 40 percent of what was determined to be a single hominin (based primarily on the fact that there was no duplication in the recovered bone element anatomy). Nick-named “Lucy” by the excavators, the find became the first and perhaps most iconic specimen of the Au. afarensis hominin species. Examination of the bones further indicated that Lucy was indeed a female, standing about three-and-a-half feet tall and weighing between 60 to 65 pounds — diminutive by modern human standards — with a small brain, not much larger than a chimpanzee. Using paleomagnetic, paleontological, and sediment studies, researchers dated Lucy to almost 3.18 million years old. 

Among the most revelatory findings from examination of Lucy’s bones was the determination that she walked upright, much like humans, suggesting a life-way much different than the other primates, where knuckle-walking and an arboreal lifestyle (movement in trees) was most characteristic. But Lucy’s arms were proportionately longer than those of later hominins and modern humans, a characteristic more like those of chimpanzees and the the other Great Apes. A recent study, however, has shed some additional light on the question. That study, by Christopher Ruff and colleagues of Johns Hopkins University and published November 30, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, involved taking X-ray microtomography scans of Lucy’s upper arm bone (humerus) and upper leg bone (femur) to produce cross-sections for 3D modeling. This revealed that Lucy’s humerus and femur bone strengths were somewhere between the arm and leg bone strengths of today’s chimpanzees and humans, suggesting that Lucy, and by extension the Au. afarensis species, spent a significant amount of time using arms to move through trees. Based on modern animal analogs of behavior, this meant that Au. afarensis used trees to forage for food and escape predators. Moreover, Ruff’s analysis suggested that afarensis’ walking gait may have been somewhat different and less efficient than that of modern humans. In any case, however, the footprints at Laetoli have been considered strong confirmation that Au. afarensis walked upright as a sustained activity. (Pictured right, the full skeletal array of Lucy’s remains, 120, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, Wikimedia Commons)

To date, scientists have recovered fossils from more than 300 Au. afarensis individuals discovered at various sites, such as Hadar and Dikika, in Ethiopia and Laetoli in Tanzania and have placed the species within a 3.85 – 2.95 mya date range.

 Bone Clones skull cast of Australopithecus afarensis “Lucy” Wikimedia Commons

 __________________________________________

An endocast of the Australopithecus afarensis brain on display in the Hall of Human Origins in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.  To create an endocast, scientists fill the inside of the skull with a rubber-like material, making a model of the brain. The brain and its blood vessels leave imprints on the inside of the skull. Because more advanced brains have smaller veins and many more folds and lobes, an endocast is very useful in determing how intelligent a human ancestor might have been, and what portions of its brain were more developed.  Tim Evanson, Wikimedia Commons

___________________________________________________

 Australopithecus afarensis paleoanthropological sites in East Africa – Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia  Chartep, Wikimedia Commons

________________________________________________________ 

Based on research, if one were to observe a living Au. afarensis, one would see a creature that looked much like an ape with some human-like features. It had apelike face proportions and a small braincase and apelike long arms with hands exhibiting curved fingers. But it also had small canine teeth like other, later early humans and walked upright on a regular basis. Many scientists suggest that its adaptations for both walking upright and living in trees helped the species survive more than 900,000 years before going extinct, much longer than the time our own species, Homo sapiens, has existed.

_______________________________________ 

Moving Forward  

Like many other hominin sites throughout Africa, scientists would likely tell us that there is probably much more to glean from the areas in which the sites are located, adding to the record of early human existence on the African continent. Laetoli has only revealed a fraction of the trackways that may still lie buried beneath the modern dry volcanic sand of this ancient savanna grassland. Cherin and his colleagues plan to return to the site. “We are now collecting funding for new field seasons at Laetoli,” says Cherin. “Our goal is to expose some additional footprints to study the locomotion of the track-makers and, simultaneously, to elaborate a proper conservation strategy to make these incredible findings available for future generations.”

The story of Laetoli is clearly not over.

                                                                      —Ed.

_______________________________________

 Reconstruction of the Laetoli palaeolandscape and the Au. afarensis group 3.66 million years ago. Artwork Dawid A. Iurino. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

____________________________________

(1) Marco Cherin is a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Perugia, Italy, whose first research topic is the systematics, biology, ecology and evolution of Plio-Pleistocene terrestrial mammals of Europe and East Africa. He works mainly on terrestrial carnivores, such as canids, felids, mustelids, etc.  In 2010, together with his colleague Angelo Barili (Natural History Museum, University of Perugia), he began a collaborative relationship with Fidelis Masao (University of Dar es Salaam). Every year they organize a field workshop in Olduvai Gorge, a famous Tanzanian paleoanthropological site not far from Laetoli. 

*Masao, et al., New Footprints from Laetoli (Tanzania) provide evidence for marked body size variation in early hominins, eLife 2016;5:e19568.DOI: 10.7554/eLife.19568 

Image, third from top, left: Southern portion of test-pit L8 at Laetoli Site S. Photo Raffaello Pellizzon. Licensed under CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

_______________________________________

Footprints in the Silt

It was an almost desperate race against time. On one side was the ocean, its relentless incoming and outgoing tides beating and constantly reshaping the beach, as any ocean would do. On the opposite side were the overlying cliffs, the erosion of which through time helped to expose a series of small hollows, what appeared to be human footprints, on an ancient beach surface dated hundreds of thousands of years into the past. This team of scientists knew they had only a short window of time to observe and record them before the elements erased the hollows back into oblivion.

“When we first saw them, we were in a state of initial disbelief, but once we’d ruled out all the other possibilities we were utterly amazed that, first, they survived, and second, that we happened to be there during the few days that they were exposed,” said Nick Ashton, a curator with the British Museum for over 25 years. Ashton is also the Director of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project (AHOB) funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He has been directing the oceanside Happisburgh Paleolithic excavations, where these footprint finds were located. The site has yielded evidence of a human presence as far back as 800,000 years ago, and the footprints tell a story of humans who may have walked this place even more anciently.

But Ashton and his team faced a serious challenge. Their task to initially examine and document them could only be measured in a few weeks, if not days. 

“The first problem was mobilizing a team to record them,” said Ashton. “But Sarah Duffy from York University stepped into the breach, coming down at short notice to record them using multi-image photogrammetry.” Duffy is an archaeologist with specialized expertise in digital imaging techniques as they apply to archaeology.

“The weather was foul,” he added. “We couldn’t get down to the beach until just after 5 pm just as it started to lash with rain. Heavy seas meant that there were only 3-4 hours in which to record them, but first we had to remove the beach sand that had accumulated since the last tide and remove the excess water from the hollows. As Sarah started the recording we were continually using sponges to remove the persistent rain-water. By this time the light was fading, despite being May and I really had little faith in the technique working. We eventually left the beach cold, wet and somewhat demoralized. However, the results were stunning.”

 Above and below: Area A (which includes the hollows/footprints) at Happisburgh from cliff top looking south. (Photo: Martin Bates).

The imaging showed that the hollows were elongated, like the shape of a foot, and the majority of them fell within the range previously determined through paleoanthropological research as juvenile to adult hominin foot sizes. “In many cases, the arch and front/ back of the foot can be identified and in one case the impression of toes can be seen,” write Ashton and colleagues in their more recent research report.*

Moreover, further study indicated that they were dealing not with just one individual, but a group of perhaps five individuals of mixed ages — perhaps an adult and several children. And whoever they were, they were apparently moving in a southerly direction along mudflats of an ancient estuary of a tidally-influenced river.

_________________________________________________________

 Above and below: The footprint hollows in situ on the beach at Happisburgh. (Photos: Martin Bates). 

 Above: Detail of footprint surface. (Photo: Martin Bates)

Vertical image of Area A at Happisburgh with model of footprint surface produced from photogrammetric survey with enlarged photo of footprint 8 showing toe impressions. © Happisburgh Project

Enhanced 3D model of footprint surface produced from photogrammetric survey by using color to indicate depth. © Happisburgh Project

But perhaps the biggest find had to do with age. The ancient laminated silt layers in which the footprints were found were directly associated with ancient laminated silt layers and lag gravels that had already been dated nearby. Artifacts, flora and fauna found within those layers helped to pinpoint the age range.

“An artefact assemblage has been recovered from these lag gravels, consisting of flint flakes, flake tools and cores. The sediments also contain a rich assemblage of fauna and flora which suggest that the archaeological evidence can be attributed to the later part of an interglacial. This interglacial is dated on the basis of biostratigraphical and palaeomagnetic evidence to the latter part of the Early Pleistocene, perhaps MIS 21 or MIS 25,” reported Ashton and colleagues.* 

In other words, the footprints, according to Ashton and his research team, are dated to between ca. 1 and 0.78 million years ago.

The finding was astounding. This meant that this was the oldest known hominin footprint surface outside of Africa. It pushed the record of human occupation of northern Europe back by at least 350,000 years. 

The footprints have become a major a milestone in a series of discoveries beginning in 2000 at this location, named after the nearby village of Happisburgh on the coast of eastern England. 

“The first evidence of Palaeolithic archaeology was a handaxe found by a local person walking their dog (Mike Chambers),” said Ashton. “Although this dates to 500,000 years ago, it led to further fieldwork and the discovery of ‘Site 3’ dating to 800,000 years old and subsequently the footprints.”

Happisburgh has been found to feature a remarkable concentration of Early Stone Age, or Lower Palaeolithic, sites that were buried in time under glacial sediments and subsequently exposed in time as a result of coastal erosion. Thus far, excavations have revealed numerous artifacts as well as butchered large mammal bones and other biological remains across five identified sites, tell-tale signs of a human presence during a cool climatic period around 500,000 years ago and earlier. At “Site 3”, the location of the recently discovered footprints, about 80 stone tools have been uncovered during large scale excavations from 2005 to 2010. Studies have shown that this area was once the location of an ancient river channel. The river was the ancestral river of the current Thames which, hundreds of thousands of years ago, flowed into the North Sea 150 kilometres north of its present day estuary. 

Research on the plant and animal remains recovered from the site have afforded archaeologists and other scientists the opportunity to reconstruct the climate and environment of the area as it existed more than half a million years ago, at the time the artifact-bearing sediments were deposited. They found that these early humans occupied the area during a cooling period when a conifer woodland was predominant: 

From palynological analysis of adjoining sediments, the local vegetation consisted of a mosaic of open coniferous forest of pine (Pinus), spruce (Picea), with some birch (Betula). Alder (Alnus) was growing in wetter areas and there were patches of heath and grassland. This vegetation is characteristic of the cooler climate typically found at the beginning or end of an interglacial or during an interstadial period….*

To date, no human fossil bones have been excavated at Site 3 or any of the other four sites. But now, analysis of the footprints, combined with current knowledge about early human occupation of Europe, are providing some clues about who these people were and how they might fit into the developing landscape of the first humans in the European geographic arena.

_______________________________

 Reconstruction of Happisburgh, over 800,000 years ago. © John Sibbick

 _______________________________________

Measuring the Evidence

The researchers measured a total of 152 hollows/footprints, indicating a preponderance of elongated forms and shapes, form features and measurements that suggested they were made by perhaps 5 individual humans of varying size and age. Foot size yielded estimates of height. Most significantly, the dimensions seem to fit neatly into the range identified through previous studies and archaeological investigations as attributed to an early human form that is known to have occupied Europe during the Middle Pleistocene.

“Overall the estimated foot size, foot area and stature of the Happisburgh hominins correspond with the estimates for Homo antecessor,” report Ashton, et.al.*

Homo antecessor (or H. antecessor) — the name derives from landmark human fossil discoveries made at the archaeological cave sites of Gran Dolina and Sima del Elefante at the Sierra de Atapuerca mountain in northern Spain. There, archaeologists Eudald Carbonell, Juan Luis Arsuaga and J. M. Bermúdez de Castro discovered fossil evidence of an extinct human species that lived between  800,000 to 1.2 million years ago. Carbonell and his colleagues estimate that the adult H. antecessor stood about 1.6-1.8 m (5½-6 feet) tall, similar to the recent estimates from Happisburgh (ca. 0.93 for the juvenile and 1.73 m for the adult), and weighed roughly 90 kg (200 pounds). Their brain sizes are estimated to be 1,000–1,150 cm³, smaller than the 1,350 cm³ average for modern humans. But because the fossil evidence is comparatively scarce, little else is known about the physiology of this ancient human species. To date, these sites are the only locations where fossilized remains of the species have been found, but the finds have interjected a new chapter in the developing picture of human evolution and the advent of early humans (hominins) on the European subcontinent. 

So now, Happisburgh adds yet another discovery to the mix: H. antecessor, or something like it, occupied the northern parts of Europe, or at least the region today known as the UK, as much as 1 million years ago. 

Walking the Beach

The evidence thus far could present an intriguing, albeit incomplete picture of what could be going on in this place so long ago. Informed by the findings and what he already knows about the prehistory of the area and the interdisciplinary science thus far applied to human beginnings in this part of the world, Ashton paints a hypothetical picture:

“We appear to be dealing with a small family group walking along the muddy fringes of an estuary perhaps 10 to 15 miles from the coast. It would be nice to imagine that they’re pausing in their walk to collect shell fish, crabs and possibly seaweed. Around would have been the grassy floodplain, grazed by deer, horse and bison together with more exotic animals such as rhino, hippo and elephant. In the distance coniferous forest would have dominated the surrounding hills.”

With more work, this picture could become much larger with greater detail. But time is of the essence. As Ashton reports: 

The rarity of such evidence is equalled only by its fragility at Happisburgh, where severe coastal erosion is both revealing and rapidly destroying sites that are of international significance. The pre-glacial succession around Happisburgh has now revealed several archaeological locations of Early Pleistocene and early Middle Pleistocene age with evidence of flint artefacts, cut-marked bones and footprints. Importantly, the sites are associated with a rich environmental record of flora and fauna allowing detailed reconstructions of the human habitats and the potential for preservation of organic artefacts. Continuing erosion of the coastline will reveal further exposures of the HHF and new sites, which promise to transform our understanding of the earliest human occupation of northern latitudes.*

“We’ll be continuing to work in the area as new information is revealed every time we visit,” he says. “Over the years we have built up a team of local people who walk the beaches on a far more regular basis and are excellent at reporting back any new discoveries, whether these be new sediments, artifacts or fossil bones.”

Dr Nick Ashton, British Museum at the Happisburgh site. Dr Ashton is the Co-Director of the Happisburgh Project and the British Museum’s curator of the Palaeolithic collections. Photo: Happisburgh Project 

______________________________

*Ashton N, Lewis SG, De Groote I, Duffy SM, Bates M, et al. (2014) Hominin Footprints from Early Pleistocene Deposits at Happisburgh, UK. PLoS ONE 9(2): e88329. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0088329

Cover Photo, Top Left: Photograph of the footprint hollows in situ on the beach at Happisburgh, Norfolk. (Photo: Martin Bates).

______________________________

Stepping Out of Africa: Early Human Footprints in Arabia

It must have been an astonishing moment when they first laid eyes on them. Here, on this arid, inhospitable landscape, they found fossilized footprints of humans that inhabited what is the present-day Nefud Desert in Saudi Arabia about 120,000 years ago. For the first time, the remarkable discovery provided direct supporting evidence for the presence of anatomically modern humans (AMH, or Homo sapiens) in a region suggested by some scientists to have been inhabited during early exodus dispersal episodes of humans out of Africa well before the date range thought by most archaeologists for the exit (about 60,000 years ago). 

Through investigative field efforts led by Mathew Stewart of the Max Planck Institutes for Chemical Ecology (MPI-CE), the research team, consisting of members from MPI-CE and the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) in Jena, Germany and Royal Holloway University of London, UK, along with other partners, discovered the footprints along with numerous other large mammal footprint tracks in the Alathar ancient paleolake deposit located within the western Nefud desert. The geological deposit, like the desert that surrounds it, has been dry for tens of thousands of years. But at one time it formed the bed of a fresh water lake. The researchers surveyed two sections within a 1.8-meter-thick deposit of sandy-silt diatomite layer, which was overlaid by a layer formed by windblown sand. They uncovered a total of 376 tracks, which included 44 elephant, 107 camel, and 7 hominin footprints. The sediment in which the tracks were found was sandwiched between a younger sediment above and an older sediment below, dating the tracks to a time between 112,00 and 121,000 years ago. 

“We immediately realized the potential of these findings,” said Stewart. “Footprints are a unique form of fossil evidence in that they provide snapshots in time, typically representing a few hours or days, a resolution we tend not get from other records.” Similar striking snapshots on the spectrum of human evolution have been discovered, for example, at Laetoli in Tanzania and near Happisburgh in the UK.

Other than the human footprints, equally noteworthy were the elephant tracks, as elephants are thought to have gone extinct in the Levant to the west about 400 thousand years ago. According to team member and study author Michael Petraglia of MPI-SHH, the evidence for the presence of large mammals like elephants and water-loving hippos, along with the paleoenvironmental evidence for open grasslands and significant water resources such as lakes in Arabia at this ancient time, likely meant the region was a desirable place for animals, including humans, to pass through and inhabit as a kind of corridor region between Africa and Eurasia. In the case of Alathar, the findings suggest that the animals and humans were coming together to forage and survive around the ancient lake during a time of increasing aridification (drying) and diminishing water resources. “We know people visited the lake, but the lack of stone tools or evidence of the use of animal carcasses suggests that their visit to the lake was only brief,” says Stewart. 

Following the Green

The findings actually represent an event within a larger pattern of environmental fluctuations and animal and human movements over time in the region. “In the present day,” says Ash Parton of the University of Oxford, a specialist on palaeoenvironmental change, “monsoon rains only reach the very south-southwestern edges of the peninsula; however, palaeoclimatic evidence suggests that over the past 130,000 years there have been several periods in which these rains extended all the way into the desert interior. Utilizing a technique that allows researchers to know when individual grains of sand were buried (optically stimulated luminescence dating), findings suggest that the ‘greening of Arabia’ occurred approximately every 22,000 years between around 130,000 and 50,000 years ago. During these times drainage systems became active, leading to the expansion of large meandering rivers and the development of vast freshwater lakes, some of which were up to 2000 km². Palaeoenvironmental evidence from relict lake beds in what are now the hyper-arid Nefud and Rub al Khali deserts of Saudi Arabia, also shows that these large lakes were fringed with grasslands and trees, and home to a wide variety of fauna.”

The Gateway to Eurasia 

The species of human that moved through the region during this time period remains a matter of debate. Neanderthals were in Eurasia at the time. But the archaeological record thus far does not support their presence in Arabia during this period, and the record for modern human habitation of the Levant region just to the west dates back to about 180,000 years ago. “It is only after the last interglacial with the return of cooler conditions that we have definitive evidence for Neanderthals moving into the region,” says Stewart. “The footprints, therefore, most likely represent [anatomically modern] humans, or Homo sapiens.”  

The footprints are located within what many scientists suggest was a ‘gateway’ between Africa and Eurasia, a possible general route for the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa and into the rest of the world. Although the earliest fossils of AMH discovered outside of Africa date to about 210,000 years ago in southern Greece and 180,000 years ago in the Levant, the exit routes they took from Africa into Eurasia have remained largely unknown and a topic of scholarly debate. But it is clear that investigations in Arabia will continue to play a prominent role in the debate. “Every new site being discovered in Arabia reveals remarkable new information which makes it a very exciting time to be working in the area,” said Huw Groucutt, an archaeologist and paleoanthropologist currently with the MPI-SHH who has been conducting research and working at sites in Saudi Arabia for years. “We are confident that……..we will make some major discoveries. We are also keen to see archaeological data emphasized when it seems that many archaeologists have been living in the shadow of genetics interpretations over recent years. Yet archaeological data is the only record of how humans were behaving in particular times and places, so we are trying to restore the balance to the subjects contributing to the story of modern human origins.” Thus the Alathar footprints, maintain Stewart and his colleagues, make an important contribution to the search for early movements of AMH out of Africa into the Eurasian continent.

_______________________________

View of the edge of the Alathar ancient lake deposit and surrounding landscape. Klint Janulis

_______________________________

Researchers surveying the Alathar ancient lake deposit. Palaeodeserts Project

_______________________________

The first human footprint discovered at Alathar and its corresponding digital elevation model (DEM). Stewart et al., 2020

_______________________________

Above and below: First human footprints discovered at the Alathar ancient lake. Klint Janulis

_______________________________

_______________________________

Article sources: SCIENCE ADVANCES and MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY press releases, and The First Arabians, published June 5, 2014 in Popular Archaeology Magazine. Above article published previously on September 17, 2020 in Popular Archaeology.

_______________________________

Advertisement

_______________________________

Trackways of Otero

Anyone who visits White Sands National Park in south central New Mexico cannot help but marvel at the stark yet uniquely beautiful, undulating formations of white, rich gypsum crystal sand dunes that make it stand out from most any other arid landscape on the planet. It is what draws its thousands of visitors every year. It spreads over 145,762 acres or 227.8 square miles within the Tularosa Basin, a vast geologic graben that lies between the Sacramento Mountains to the east and the San Andres and Oscura Mountains to the west. White Sands is the largest of its kind anywhere on Earth, its gypsum sand depth extending as much as 30 feet and its dunes reaching a hight as much as 60 feet —  a mass of 4.1 billion metric tons. Despite its aridity, among its dunes live mammal populations of fox, rodents, coyotes, bobcats, badgers, rabbits, and porcupines; along with seven species of amphibians; reptiles, including a variety of lizards and snakes; and 220 species of birds. Cacti, desert grasses, and even some trees and shrubs pockmark the landscape — tracks of small animals can even be seen leading from plant to plant.

_________________________________

Aerial view of White Sands. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

_________________________________

But rewind backward over 12,000 years, and one sees a very different world. During the late Pleistocene, before the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (or LGM), the land here was characterized by lakes, rivers and streams. Vegetation was significantly more lush. It supported such animal species as mammoth, giant ground sloth, and dire wolves, mammals now long extinct. We know this because teams of scientists and specialists have spent years in the region surveying, excavating, and studying recovered finds that attest to this ancient reality. One of many locations in the region has revealed evidence of a great ancient inland body of water known to paleoclimatologists and paleontologists as Lake Otero, the largest of several lakes that characterized the Tularosa Basin between 36,000 and 19,000 years ago. Here, on what is today a dried up ancient lakebed known as a playa, teams of paleontologists and other specialists have revealed evidence for extinct late Pleistocene fauna such as mammoth, groundsloth, canid and felid carnivora (such as the dire wolf and the saber-toothed cat), bovids and camelids (such as ancient cattle species and ancient camels).

In January of 2020, one team of scientists uncovered something quite remarkable at a site they designated WHSA (White Sands) Locality 2 ………..

_________________________________

Artist recreation of late Pleistocence landscape in present-day White Sands National Park. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

_________________________________

The Unequivocal Proof

It was in 2019 when a research team consisting of a core group of specialists—Dan Odess and David Bustos from the National Park Service, Kathleen Springer and Jeff Pagati from the US Geological Survey, Tommy Urban from Cornell University, and Matthew Bennet of Bournemouth University, discovered what appeared to be human footprints among those of what they knew to be extinct megafauna. Battling arid conditions and windblown sand, in January of 2020 they meticulously excavated and eventually revealed human, proboscidean (such as mammoths), and canid (such as dire wolf) footprints in all layers or levels throughout their trenching. But of particular interest were the human tracks — no less than 61 in all — showing, according to the researchers, “good anatomical definition”, meaning they exhibited good heel impressions, toe pads and longitudinal arch definition consistent with modern Homo sapiens footprints as well as human footprints documented at other Pleistocene sites across the world. Most important, the team was able to establish a controlled chronology for the footprints by dating their sediment context using radiocarbon ages of sediment samples containing macroscopic seeds of the aquatic plant Ruppia cirrhosa (from beds of ditch grass seeds) which sandwiched the relevant footprint-bearing layers. The dating sequence yielded calibrated ages from 22.86 ± 0.32 to 21.13 ± 0.25 ka.*

In other words, there were humans at this location 23,000 years ago, and perhaps even earlier.

_________________________________

David Bustos excavating at site WHSA 2. Bustos initially discovered the tracks. Courtesy Matthew Bennett

_________________________________

Team members at work on the site. Courtesy David Bustos.

_________________________________

Human fossil print trackway. Courtesy David Bustos.

_________________________________

Human fossil footprint tracks at the site. Courtesy Dan Flores.

_________________________________

One of the oldest tracks at the site. Courtesy Matthew Bennett.

_________________________________

“We had discovered human tracks at White Sands before so it was not a big surprise,” said Matthew Bennett, a lead researcher and ichnologist at the site. Among footprints they have previously discovered at White Sands and analyzed was a trackway, now considered the longest prehistoric human trackway ever found (measured at over 1.5 kilometers in length), that tells the story of a woman with a young child, perhaps a toddler, walking in a straight path at an average pace of about 1.7 meters per second — a rather determined clip. For much of her journey she carried the child. At other points along the way she had apparently let the child down to walk as she made adjustments or allowed for some rest, as the tracks showed the child walking about on its own. Equally remarkable, analysis of the trackway indicates the same woman and child returning along the same path and direction. A sloth and a mammoth had apparently crossed the human footprint trackway between the outward and return journeys. In another White Sands discovery and subsequent study, the researchers relate a story of a prehistoric sloth hunt. During that investigation, they discovered human tracks embedded within sloth prints, suggesting that humans had stepped into the sloth prints while possibly stalking them. The presence of “flailing circle” prints by the sloth indicated it rose up on its hind legs and swung its forelegs — a behavior that would match the act of defending itself with sweeping movements against attackers. Comparing this to the usual straight-line trackways for sloths when human trackways were not present, and those where changes in direction were observed when human tracks were present, the researchers were able to hypothesize a hunting scene.

_________________________________

Artist conception of prehistoric woman with child traversing the landscape, based on analysis of fossil human footprints at White Sands National Park. Karen Carr

_________________________________

But the implications of the latest discovery at WHSA site 2 were game-changing: For the first time, scientists had arguably indisputable evidence that humans were actually present in North America before the Last Glacial Maximum, when ice sheets were thought to have provided a convincing barrier to human entry into the Americas from what DNA evidence has suggested to be their ancestral homelands in Asia, west of the Bering Land Bridge, or ancient Beringia, through which humans presumably traversed to reach the Americas. Even the coastal route from Asia to the Americas is thought to have been very difficult to navigate during LGM times. So humans must have entered during a time well before the LGM.

Bennett and his colleagues are confident about their finding. “The icing on the cake here,” adds Bennett, “is that we can date these traces accurately using beds of ditch grass seeds.”**

Given what has been excavated thus far, site investigators have been able to piece together a preliminary hypothetical picture of the size, composition and activity of the group of humans at the location.

“The track sample is quite small but currently it looks to be composed of teens and children with a few adults,” says Bennett. They “give a picture of what was taking place, teenagers interacting with younger children and adults. We can think of our ancestors as quite functional, hunting and surviving, but what we see here is also activity of play, and of different ages coming together.”**

According to Dr Sally Reynolds, a mammalian palaeontologist at Bournemouth University, the discovery also gives us a broader view of these humans in their ecological context.

“It is an important site because of all of the trackways we’ve found there show an interaction of humans in the landscape alongside extinct animals like mammoths and giant sloths,” she says. “We can see the co-existence between humans and animals on the site as a whole, and by being able to accurately date these footprints, we’re building a greater picture of the landscape.”**

But, says Bennett, ”we need more tracks to say more.” Plans are to return to the site to continue excavations in January of 2022 — COVID willing.

___________________________________

Examining the seed layers. Courtesy David Bustos.

___________________________________

Above and below: Artist depiction of Pleistocene scene at White Sands National Park site. Karen Carr.

___________________________________

___________________________________

The timeline and site significance. Courtesy Matthew Bennett

___________________________________

A Shifting Paradigm

The broadly accepted view about when and how the first Americans entered the Americas has revolved in part around the changes in the glacial periods associated with the last glacial period of the Ice Age. Since about 40,000 B.P., the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets covered much of Canada. However, during the warmer interglacial periods they retreated to create ice-free corridors along the Pacific coast and areas east of the Rocky Mountains of Canada. Scientists have long suggested that it was through these corridors that humans were likely able to cross Beringia into the Americas. Beringia was a land bridge as much as 1,000 miles wide that joined present-day Alaska and eastern Siberia at various times 110,000 to 10,000 years ago. Exactly when and how this crossing may have occurred has been a matter of debate for decades.

Taken together, new discoveries and research results are beginning to paint a picture of a human beginning in the Americas that is considerably more complex and likely earlier than previously thought. An increasing number of sites in North and South America are now suggested by many scientists to have yielded a human presence well before 13,000 years ago — sites such as Meadowcroft in Pennsylvania, Cooper’s Ferry in Idaho, Friedkin in Texas, Paisley Caves in Oregon, Manis in Washington, Page-Ladson in Florida, Huaca Prieta in Peru, Chiquihuite cave in Mexico, Monte Verde in Chile, and Bluefish caves (as much as 24,000 years ago) in Canada. Most of these cases, however, are not without scholarly dispute and debate. One controversial case, in fact, revolves around a discovery made near San Diego, where the remains of a 130,000-year-old mastodon are suggested by the site investigators to be associated with simple stone human tools.

_________________________________

Stone tool found below the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) layer at Chiquihuite Cave, where stone tools suggested to be between 18,000 and 26,000 years old were discovered. Ciprian Ardelean, from America’s Ice Age Hunters, Popular Archaeology, October 23, 2020.

_________________________________

Horse mandible from Bluefish cave shows a number of cut marks on the lingual surface. They show the animal’s tongue was cut out with a stone tool. Credit: Université de Montréal, The first humans arrived in North America a lot earlier than believed, January 16, 2017.

_________________________________

Some genetic studies have shown that a single original population of modern humans dispersed from southern Siberia toward the Bering Land Bridge, or ancient Beringia, as early as about 30,000 years ago, and more dispersals from Beringia to the Americas by perhaps 16,500 years ago, with some groups traversing the Americas back into Asia. From the paleoclimate evidence, we see indications that the environmental stage was set by at least 16,300 years ago for an accommodating passage for humans into the Americas. From archaeology, we know that humans appeared south of the Canadian ice sheets by at least 15,000 years ago, 2,000 or more years before the emergence and spread of the Clovis culture, and it is no longer tenable that there is a clear linear evolutionary relationship between the Clovis culture and early technology discovered in the western regions of the North American continent.  Finally, from archaeology, evidence builds to support a suggested route along the deglaciated north Pacific coastline.

But few, perhaps no, discoveries in recent years have provided a more convincing attestation to the argument for a much earlier entry and settlement of the Americas than the recent excavation and dating of human footprints at WHSA site 2 at White Sands.

Bennett states that there is much more work to do at or near the site.

“[We need to] extend the sequence both up and down sections to look for the total duration of visitation/occupation and expand the track sample.  Also, [we need to] use some other dating techniques to build community confidence in the findings.” 

The year 2022 could provide that opportunity — provided the pandemic relinquishes some control.

__________________________________

*Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum, Matthew R. Bennett, David Bustos, Jeffrey S. Pigati, Kathleen B. Springer, Thomas M. Urban, Vance T. Holliday, Sally C. Reynolds, Marcin Budka, Jeffrey S. Honke, Adam M. Hudson, Brendan Fenerty, Clare Connelly, Patrick J. Martinez, Vincent L. Santucci ,Daniel Odess, Science, 373 (6562), • DOI: 10.1126/science.abg7586

**Earliest evidence of human activity found in the Americas, University of Arizona and Bournemouth University, September 23, 2021.

__________________________________

Advertisement

Don’t miss out on this unforgettable evening as Dr. Hawass reveals the most closely guarded secrets of ancient Egypt and presents his groundbreaking new discoveries and latest research live on stage. As the man behind all major discoveries in Egypt over the last few decades and director of several ongoing archaeological projects, Dr. Hawass may yet surprise you with unexpected revelations that will make news across the world.

__________________________________

Advertisement