120k-year-old footprints offer early evidence for humans in Arabia

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/these-120000-year-old-footprints-offer-early-evidence-humans-arabia

by diodorus • 6 years ago

107 54 6 years ago

Quarrel• 6 years ago

Very 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• 6 years ago

Yep. 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• 6 years ago

120 k years ago on Australia? Are we talking homo erectus here, or full blown homo sapiens?

he0001• 6 years ago

This sounds very cool, but how do they know that they are actual footprints and not just two holes that accidentally looks like footprints?

j0ej0ej0e• 6 years ago

If you look closely you can see the Adidas logo imprinted from the sandal

subsaharancoder• 6 years 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 :-)

klyrs2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

I 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?)

teleforce• 6 years ago

Expect 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

[2]https://sunnah.com/muslim/12/76

MichaelZuo• 6 years ago

The 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.

logicslave122• 6 years ago

This type of information is actively suppressed and speaking about is shamed

danans4• 6 years ago

The same reason why it took so long for some people to have significant Neanderthal ancestry to become accepted fact.

This is mostly because for several decades the term Neanderthal in pop culture has been used to describe someone who is brutish or dumb.

Many people want to believe that they are descended from or fashioned by the god(s) or godlike idealized humans, not from some people who trudged through a swamp and sheltered in a rock outcropping.

And now with the realization that people of Eurasian ancestry carry Neanderthal genes, you're already starting to see the same fallacy emerge in the opposite direction , where people are starting to use Neanderthal ancestry as a badge of superiority over those without it like the people of Sub-Saharan Africa.

bsanr22• 6 years ago

I recently read that the prior estimations for Neanderthal ancestry are off because they used comparative models that assumed that certain populations had no Neanderthal DNA. Newer techniques seem to indicate that almost all modern humans are partially descended from Neanderthals, including Africans.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/africa/africa-neanderthal-dna...

Interestingly, this is said to be a piece of the puzzle of whatever new model replaces the Out Of Africa one.

WilTimSon• 6 years ago

Expect 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.

Why did it open up for research? A change in leadership or just new deals opening because of money?

fakedang• 6 years ago

North-North West is where they're trying to focus their efforts in tourism, and also building that new city, since everyone knows the Bedouins in Riyadh are rather cultureless historically compared to the the Hejaz. Hence it's a bit of both, new leadership focusing on previously ignored parts and also trying to build up a tourism industry (for a rather bland place historically, since all of the history in the area is concentrated in the Holy Cities which are not open to non-Muslims).

sandworm1014• 6 years ago

Funny 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.

danans4• 6 years 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__3• 6 years ago

Man, 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• 6 years ago

Calling 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.

lostlogin• 6 years ago

When you say that your ISP won’t let you download a VPN, what does that mean?

sexpositivepriv• 6 years ago

Apple doesn't allow porn apps and provides no way to side load. That's 1.3 billion people who are effectively being censored. And before you say you can still watch videos there are apps that do things videos don't. 3D games, real VR, etc... Apple has a whole list of things you aren't allowed to have in apps.

cs02rm0• 6 years ago

I lived in Saudi for a time in the 90s too.

The censors with their felt tip pens clearly had a variety of artistic talent. I found myself choosing from various censorings of Nirvana's Nevermind which had the cover with the naked baby.

Some had a blocked out rectangle, some were scribbled on, some just blocked out the silhouette of the baby. I settled on one which had neatly drawn on a pair of swimming trunks!

Seems like another life now.

sandworm1014• 6 years ago

I saw that cover on the BBC, on QI, and it was censored. I was angry. Kirk cobain made a big deal about that album cover, saying in effect that anyone who thinks it needs to be censored should look more to themselves.

hexbinencoded3• 6 years ago

Wait, they employed people to censor individual items of commercial art manually?

Swimming trunks is a pretty funny way to do it.

Meanwhile, The Stones' Live Licks European cover is better because the American one has a bra.

bt1a• 6 years ago

It'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.

sandworm1014• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

For 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

diebeforei485• 6 years ago

I mean, we've known of early humans in Arabia for quite a while now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebel_Faya

sradman3• 6 years ago

The 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

danans4• 6 years ago

Fascinating 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.

sradman3• 6 years 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

danans4• 6 years ago

The 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%2F978-9....

Threeve303• 6 years ago

Just 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.

120k-year-old footprints offer early evidence for humans in Arabia

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