What does the Paleolithic record of Southeast Arabia tell us about hominin dispersals out of Africa?

Summary

The southern route for human dispersal out of Africa has moved from being a hypothetical idea to being considered a plausible path of human expansion. Fundamental for this development is the intensified field work in Arabia over the past decade. The stratified Paleolithic assemblages from Jebel Faya in the Emirate of Sharjah, U.A.E. play a critical role in this context. Given that Jebel Faya is separated from the African coast of the Red Sea by about 2000 km the question arise what Jebel Faya can tell us about hominin dispersals out of Africa? Will comparisons of archaeological materials over such distances allow us to draw conclusions about connections between East Africa and SE Arabia? Using assemblages from my excavations at Jebel Faya as a case study, I argue in this talk that diachronic studies about hominin behavior, including land use, raw material economy and intrasite organization, contextualized within the regional paleoenvironmenal setting provide a promising set of data for the identification of periods of population influx, continuity and extinction in the studied region. Building such models for multiple regions along the hypothetical expansion paths would allow us to gain a better understanding of the complexity associated with hominin expansion processes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Parting the Red Sea: Late Pleistocene Lithic Variability and Human Dispersals in the Horn of Africa and Arabia

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