{"id":68491,"date":"2020-09-16T21:22:58","date_gmt":"2020-09-16T18:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/ancient-footprints-in-saudi-arabia-show-how-humans-left-africa\/"},"modified":"2020-09-16T21:22:58","modified_gmt":"2020-09-16T18:22:58","slug":"ancient-footprints-in-saudi-arabia-show-how-humans-left-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/ancient-footprints-in-saudi-arabia-show-how-humans-left-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"#Ancient footprints in Saudi Arabia show how humans left Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Ancient footprints in Saudi Arabia show how humans left Africa<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\n This handout photo shows a view of the edge of the Alathar ancient lake deposit and surrounding landscape
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Around 120,000 years ago in what is now northern Saudi Arabia, a small band of homo sapiens stopped to drink and forage at a shallow lake that was also frequented by camels, buffalo and elephants bigger than any species seen today.<\/p>\n


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The humans may have hunted the big mammals but they did not stay long, using the watering hole as a waypoint on a longer journey.<\/p>\n

This detailed scene was reconstructed by researchers in a new study published in Science<\/a> Advances<\/i> on Wednesday, following the discovery of ancient human and animal footprints in the Nefud Desert that shed new light on the routes our ancient ancestors took as they spread out of Africa.<\/p>\n

Today, the Arabian Peninsula is characterized by vast, arid deserts that would have been inhospitable to early people and the animals they hunted down.<\/p>\n

But research over the last decade has shown this wasn’t always the case\u2014due to natural climate variation it experienced much greener and more humid conditions in a period known as the last interglacial.<\/p>\n

Arabia at the time was more akin to the semi-arid grasslands of the modern African savanna.<\/p>\n

The paper’s first author Mathew Stewart of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Germany, told AFP the footprints were discovered during his PhD field work in 2017 following the erosion of overlying sediments at an ancient lake dubbed ‘Alathar’ (meaning “the trace” in Arabic).<\/p>\n