Dec 9, 2010 15:39 GMT  ·  By

The soil under the Persian Gulf could have once been a fertile landmass, that sheltered some of the earliest human populations outside Africa, claims an article published in the December edition of Current Anthropology.

Jeffrey Rose, an archaeologist and researcher with the University of Birmingham in the UK, has a very interesting hypothesis about what's lying under the 'Persian Gulf Oasis': he says that the area may have been the home of early humans for more than 100,000 years, before being swallowed up by the Indian Ocean, some 8,000 years ago.

There is historical sea level data that proves that before the flood, the Gulf basin was above waters, and that started nearly 75,000 years ago.

This would have made it the perfect refuge from the deadly desert surrounding it, not to mention the underground springs or the fresh water supplied by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Baton Rivers.

When climate was at its driest, the Gulf Oasis could have even reached the size of Great Britain, according to Rose.

The researcher is actually adding a new category of people, to the human history of the Near East, and says that these people may have established permanent settlements in the region, thousands of years before the start of any current migration model.

He bases his affirmations, on the finding of evidence of human settlements along the shores of the Gulf, dating from nearly 7,500 years ago.

He said that “where before there had been but a handful of scattered hunting camps, suddenly, over 60 new archaeological sites appear virtually overnight.

“These settlements boast well-built, permanent stone houses, long-distance trade networks, elaborately decorated pottery, domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest boats in the world.”

Other evidence adds up to this and says that modern humans could have been in the region even before the oasis was above water level.

For example, the recently discovered archaeological sites in Yemen and Oman, where a stone tool style different from the East African tradition has been discovered.

According to Rose, this only suggests that humans were settled on the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, starting as far as 100,000 years ago or even more.

Even so, this is far earlier than the estimates of the most recent migration models, that established the first successful migration into Arabia somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago.

There is however an intriguing slight detail to Rose's theory – the way that these very well developed settlements appeared so fast, without any previous populations present in the archaeological record.

The archaeologist has an answer for that too: he says that these preceding populations have not been found because they are under the Gulf.

“Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founding of such remarkably well developed communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago,” added Rose.

“These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean.”

If the presence of human groups in the oasis should ever be proved, Rose believes that this will “fundamentally alter our understanding of human emergence and cultural evolution in the ancient Near East.”