14 DAY TRIAL // New discoveries related to the route taken by our Stone Age ancestors to leave Africa reveal that they also traveled through Arabia, rather than through the near and middle East, as originally discovered.
The thing that makes these findings so important is that they push back the date of the first substantial human migrations beyond Africa by more than 65,000 years, as far back as 125,000 years.
This is when early humans reached the shores of southwestern Asia, or the eastern edge of Arabia. Our modern ancestors were therefore a lot quicker to leave the Cradle of Life than originally believed.
Details of the amazing findings were published in the January 28 issue of the top journal Science. Oddly enough, a large number of discoveries related to the African migrations and the means by which they were accomplished have been published.
Recently, archaeologists found tell-tale signs that some of our ancestors may have left Africa via the Mediterranean Sea, by using boats. This means that humankind developed boat “technology” a lot faster than originally established, Science News reports.
Evidence about the early human migration out of Africa were discovered at Jebel Faya, a rock shelter in the Arabian Peninsula, where experts discovered stone tools that looked like cutting implements found at locations in East Africa.
The African artifacts were produced via the same manufacturing technique, and have about the same age as the Arabian objects, say investigators in the United Kingdom and Germany.
The international team of investigators that made the findings, was led by University of London physical geographer Simon Armitage and University of Tübingen archaeologist Hans-Peter Uerpmann.
“New dates at Jebel Faya reveal that modern humans migrated out of Africa much earlier than previously thought, helped by global fluctuations in sea-level and climate change in the Arabian Peninsula,” Armitage argues.
Fossil and genetic evidences place the evolution of the modern human in East Africa about 200,000 years ago. Previous studies have suggested that the largest migration from Africa to Asia occurred some 60,000 years ago.
Armitage explains that the scenario which states that India became uninhabitable for thousands of years, following the eruption of Mount Toba some 74,000 years ago, is now become improbable.
He says that the Bab al-Mandab Strait that separates southwest Arabia from eastern Africa shrunk to less than 4 kilometers some 130,000 years ago, which meant that modern humans were allowed safe passage.