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120k-year-old footprints offer early evidence for humans in Arabia
- Quarrel 6y agoVery cool. This tracks pretty well with the earliest times talked about now for people in Australia. Somewhere in that ballpark people needed to be walking out of Africa so they could end up in Australia.
- menybuvico 6y agoYep. There most likely were multiple waves of emigration from Africa. It's just that the most recent one is the one that made the largest impression in the gene pool.
- dorfsmay 6y ago120 k years ago on Australia? Are we talking homo erectus here, or full blown homo sapiens?
- he0001 6y agoThis sounds very cool, but how do they know that they are actual footprints and not just two holes that accidentally looks like footprints?
- j0ej0ej0e 6y agoIf you look closely you can see the Adidas logo imprinted from the sandal
- subsaharancoder 6y ago> If you look closely you can see the Adidas logo imprinted from the sandal this just put a smile on my face..thank you :-)
- klyrs 6y agohttps://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/38/eaba8940 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/38/eaba8940 Seven, actually. They found hundreds of footprints of various animals, about half of which were too questionable to identify. Footprints are often identified because they get filled in with a different material than the substrate. One on its own might not be enough for a positive ID, but this is way bigger than "two holes"
- gus_massa 6y agoI agree. I don't know why the press article choose the first image of Figure 4, the second image is much more convincing. (You can see clearly the toes, except the middle one.) Also, in the bottom center of Figure 1 you it is possible to see that they found 4 footprints in a row, and if you imagine that there are one or two missing footprints they are at the correct distance, like the path of someone waking. (Why there are only right footprints and no left footprints?)
- klyrs 6y ago> Why there are only right footprints and no left footprints? Pure speculation here (plus some experience/training in tracking), but if somebody is walking along a shore with one foot in mud, and the other foot in dirt, they only leave deep impressions on one side. Similarly, if they're walking with one foot in shallow water, and one foot in mud, then one side will erode much faster than the other.
- dmckeon 6y ago> Why there are only right footprints and no left footprints? Walking around the edge of a lake, with the lake to the walker’s right, and softer/wetter ground under the right feet?
- teleforce 6y agoExpect to see more archaeology findings around the area of North or North West of Saudi Arabia. This area has been an archeology blindspots until 1980s [1]. Fun facts, the green pastures of Arabian Peninsula in ancient times has been mentioned in a well known authentic hadith (saying of Muhammad), "The Hour will not begin until the land of the Arabs once again becomes meadows and rivers”[2]. [1]http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3224/1/1.pdf http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3224/1/1.pdf [2]https://sunnah.com/muslim/12/76 https://sunnah.com/muslim/12/76
- MichaelZuo 6y agoThe evidence for multiple waves of human migration out of Africa is looking more and more likely. It’s been ignored primarily due to the political, philosophical, perhaps even meta philosophical reasons. As the implication is that significant genomic differences existed within and between the early human populations. And so whether all of them qualify as “human”. The same reason why it took so long for some people to have significant Neanderthal ancestry to become accepted fact. The average percentage of Neanderthal ancestry seems to increase as you move eastwards to East Asia.
- logicslave12 6y agoThis type of information is actively suppressed and speaking about is shamed
- amanaplanacanal 6y agoI’ve never heard about this being an problem. Can you point to some discussion of this topic?
- logicslave12 6y agoBring it up at work and see how well that goes. Also I can’t really point to discussion on it, almost all of it is deleted on platforms like Reddit
- sandworm101 6y agoFunny Saudi Arabia + fossil footprints story: Back in the 90s I was in saudi arabia when a national geographic story came out about some fossil footprints. Because of the size/spacing of the prints it was evident that two proto-humans, one smaller, were walking together while perhaps holding hands. So the cover art was two hairy proto-humans, one male and one female, naked, walking hand in hand away from the viewer. Needless to say this was an issue for the saudi censors, who at that time would ink over magazine covers by hand. By censoring anything you suggest that these are people, not animals, and thereby acknowledge evolution. Do you censor the female? The male? Both? On store shelves I saw every interpretation. My favorite was the one that ignored the nakedness, censored only the hand holding.
- danans 6y ago> Needless to say this was an issue for the saudi censors, who at that time would ink over magazine covers by hand. Even funnier is that the people employed to do the censorship were usually foreign guest workers, often Indians, to ensure that no Saudis themselves were exposed during the process of censorship.
- mhh__ 6y agoMan, it would be so bad if a western democracy had a similarly prudish censorship policy online, right? (Welcome to the UK in 2020, where by default I can't watch whatever I want and I don't think my ISP will let me download a VPN at all)
- davisoneee 6y agoCalling it 'censorship' seems a bit inflated...you can request UK ISPs to remove the content filter. Further, the UK government retracted the internet 'porn' bill, which was a big driver of the act anyway. I think it's a bit unfair to conflate 'always on' and 'default on, but easy to remove'. edit: also, I'm in the UK, and happily using a VPN on Windows, Linux, and Android with no issues.
- mhh__ 6y ago
- bt1a 6y agoIt's a bit mindblowing to consider that the imprinted weight of a human through the form of a foot survives one hundred twenty thousand years. Thousands of generations of human life passed, and this remarkably small piece of evidence remained locked in time, waiting to be discovered by future scientists. Alright I need to slow down on the coffee this morning.
- sandworm101 6y ago>> one hundred twenty thousand years. Thousands of generations of human life That's nothing. There are plenty of fossil dinosaur footprints aged many millions of years.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoFor what it's worth, fossilized "footprints" go way back to the appearance of multicellular organisms, the Ediacaran Period 600Mya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota
- blocked_again 6y agoThe article show the picture of a fossilized footprint. Could that have been one of our ancestors or a relative?
- diebeforei485 6y agoI mean, we've known of early humans in Arabia for quite a while now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebel_Faya https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebel_Faya
- sradman 6y agoThe paper Human footprints provide snapshot of last interglacial ecology in the Arabian interior [1]: > Diatom paleoecology and sedimentary analysis indicate that Alathar was an oligotrophic (nutrient-poor) and shallow freshwater lake for the majority of its existence. This is consistent with similar-aged nearby freshwater paleolake deposits situated in the southern reaches of a “freshwater corridor” that connected the Arabian interior to the Levant and northeast Africa at times during marine isotope stage 5 (MIS 5; ~130 to 80 ka) > The lake surface is heavily trampled, which probably reflects a dry season during which herbivores congregate around diminishing water supplies, and is consistent with sedimentary evidence for the drying up of the lake at that time. A total of 376 footprints were recorded, of which 177 could be either confidently or provisionally referred to an ichnotaxon. Seven hominin footprints were confidently identified... we argue that H. sapiens was responsible for the tracks at Alathar. > Given their similar orientation, distances from one another, and differences in size, they are interpreted as two, or up to three, individuals traveling in concert. > Elephants, in particular, suggest the regional presence of freshwater sources and substantial plant biomass, while the size of the tracks is suggestive of a species larger than any extant taxon. > Some of the ungulate prints are consistent in shape and size with a giant buffalo, possibly Syncerus, a taxon previously identified at nearby MIS 5 sites. The research paints a wonderful picture of this "freshwater corridor" during the MIS 5 interglacial. The question I have is what caused the ecology to dry out in our own interglacial? Did the Great Rift change enough in 100 kyr to impact the local climate this much? [1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/38/eaba8940 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/38/eaba8940
- danans 6y agoFascinating find, but as the article implies, the climate/landscape of the Arabian Peninsula was very wet then, and what we call the Red Sea today was at time likely an estuary, so hardly a barrier. So what we call Arabia and Africa weren't distinct land masses, and if anything it would be surprising if they were not inhabited by hominids similar to those nearby in today's Africa.
- sradman 6y ago> what we call the Red Sea today was at time likely an estuary The Red Sea Rift is quite recent [1] in geological time but not 120 kya recent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_Rift#Spreading_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_Rift#Spreading_model
- danans 6y agoThe phenomenon that would have made it an estuary on the hominid and homo sapiens timescale is lower sea levels due to ice ages. 40% of the Red Sea is only 100 m deep, and during the last major ice age 20kya sea levels were 120 m lower than they are today. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-90-481-2639-2_129#:~:text=The%20Red%20Sea%20proper%20is,is%20shallower%20than%20100%20m https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-9....
- sradman 6y agoMarine Isotope Stage 5 [1] was a high sea level interglacial: > Thus, the present interglacial, the Holocene, is compared with MIS 5 or the interglacials of Marine Isotope Stage 11. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Isotope_Stage_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Isotope_Stage_5
- Threeve303 6y agoJust as likely, it could be evidence that humans gain the ability to time travel in the future and decide to go 120k years into the past.