Humans in Southern Arabia 10,000 years earlier.

[anansi]

Humans in Southern Arabia 10,000 years
earlier than first thought

The last Ice Age made much of the globe uninhabitable, but there were oases - or refugia - where people 20,000 years ago were able to cluster and survive. Researchers at the University of Huddersfield, who specialise in the analysis of human DNA, have found new evidence that there was one or more of these shelters in what is now Southern Arabia.

Once the Ice Age receded - with the onset of the Late Glacial period about 15,000 years ago - the people of this refugium then dispersed and populated Arabia and the Horn of Africa, and might also have migrated further afield.

The view used to be that people did not settle in large numbers in Arabia until the development of agriculture, around 10-11,000 years ago. Now, the findings by members of the University of Huddersfield's Archaeogenetics Research Group demonstrate that modern humans have dwelt in this territory for far longer than previously thought. The new genetic data and analysis bolsters a theory that has long been held by archaeologists, although they had little evidence to support it until now.

The new argument for an Ice Age refugium in Arabia - perhaps on the Red Sea plains - is put forward in a new article published in the journal Scientific Reports. Its principal author is Dr Francesca Gandini, who was based at the University of Pavia in Italy before relocating in early 2015 to the University of Huddersfield, where she is a Research Fellow in Archaeogenetics and a member of the group headed by Professor Martin Richards.
Read more at archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2016/05/humans-in-southern-arabia-10000-years.html#zDoiLTmmuRzSFM6Q.99

Spatial frequency distribution map of haplogroup ROa
[Credit: University of Huddersfield]

Dr Gandini is currently playing a central role in the development of an Ancient DNA lab at the University of Huddersfield, which is home to a Centre for Evolutionary Genomics. It has been awarded £1 million by the Leverhulme Trust in order to provide doctoral training to the next generations of specialists in a field that uses the latest DNA science to delve into evolutionary history.

The new discoveries about an Ice Age refugium in Arabia and the subsequent outward migration are based on a study of a rare mitochondrial DNA lineage named R0a, which, uniquely, is most frequent in Arabia and the Horn of Africa. Dr Gandini and her co-researchers have reached the conclusion that this lineage is more ancient than previously thought and that it has a deeper presence in Arabia than was earlier believed. This makes the case for at least one glacial refugium during the Pleistocene period, which spanned the Ice Age.

The new article also describes the dispersals during the postglacial period, around 11,000 years ago, of people from Arabia into eastern Africa. Moreover, there is evidence for the movement of people in the R0a haplogroup through the Middle East and into Europe and there might also have been a trading network and a "gene flow" from Arabia into the territories that are now Iran, Pakistan and India.
Read more at archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2016/05/humans-in-southern-arabia-10000-years.html#55zMlV0Og15FK06l.99

Zarahan and Xyyman should have fun with this.

[anastasiaescrava]

So it's basically pointing to evidence of the original inhabitants of Arabian peninsula being East Africans?

[anansi]

May 12, 2016 23:52:27 GMT -5 anastasiaescrava said:

So it's basically pointing to evidence of the original inhabitants of Arabian peninsula being East Africans?

Yes that's exactly what they are saying, off course we knew this but they just up the date on the whole thing.

[zarahan]

Good find Anansi. Some time ago, I heard some usual suspects try to spin finds in Arabia as an
"alternative" to the Out of Africa model, but they keep failing. The people in place
in ancient Arabia migrated there from East Africa to begin with. And archaeology shows
their artifacts in place- notably the "Nubian complex" technological package. If they moved
back to East Africa its STILL tropical Africans moving from tropical Arabia back into
another tropical zone where they came from originally. These Nubian style artifacts are
found as far as Oman on the Gulf. Quote:

"The 'Afro-Arabian Nubian Technocomplex” encompasses the African and Arabian Nubian Traditions, which, in turn, consist of a series of technologically related lithic industries that are distinguished by the presence of the Nubian Levallois core reduction strategy (Guichard and Guichard, 1965;Marks, 1968;Van Peer, 1992;Rose et al., 2011). Nubian Levallois technology was first recognized in northern Sudan in the 1960s, and has since been discovered throughout the Middle and Lower Nile Valley (Van Peer,2000;Van Peer et al., 2003,2010; Chiotti et al., 2009; Olszewski et al., 2010), eastern Sahara oases (Wendorf et al., 1994; Smith et al., 2007a), and the Red Sea hills (Van Peer et al., 1996). To a much lesser extent, this technology appears in the Horn of Africa..
’
One Crater (Kurashina, 1978) and Gorgora Rockshelter (Clark, 1988) in Ethiopia, and Hargeisa (Clark, 1954) in northern Somalia. Nubian Levallois technology is also found extending across-southern Arabia. Nubian Complex occurrences are reported fromthe Hadramaut Valley in central Yemen (Inizan and Ortlieb, 1987; Crassard, 2009; Crassard and Thiébaut, 2011) and Dhofar, southern Oman, where a dated assemblage at Aybut al Auwal confirms the presence of the Nubian Complex in Arabia over 100,000 years ago(Rose et al., 2011). Given its wide geographic spread across North-east Africa and South Arabia and its variability overtime,these site scan now be designated, in broadest terms, as belonging to a coherent Afro-Arabian Nubian Technocomplex (or complex for short; see Clarke (1978) for a discussion of lithic techno-typological units).African Nubian Complex toolmakers were most likely anatomically modern humans (AMHs).."

--Vitaly I. Usik et al. 2012. Nubian Complex reduction strategies in Dhofar, southern Oman


----------------------------------

QUOTE:
There is a growing convergence of paleontological, archaeological and genetic evidence for the African origin of modern humans and their successive dispersals. However, there is disagreement about the route or routes taken by early humans during their migration out of Africa. This article examines the Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age archaeological evidence from the Horn of Africa, the Nile Valley/eastern Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant, and assesses their relevance to this question. Specific reduction techniques and typological variables are used to compare industries across these regions. This study shows that there are more evident technological and typological similarities among assemblages from the Horn, the Nile Valley and Arabia than between any of these regions and the Levant."
--Beyin A (2006) The Bab al Mandab vs the Nile-Levant: an appraisal of the two dispersal routes for early modern humans out of Africa. Afr Archaeol Rev 23: 5–30.
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Despite the numerous studies proposing early human population expansions from Africa into Arabia during the Late Pleistocene, no archaeological sites have yet been discovered in Arabia that resemble a specific African industry, which would indicate demographic exchange across the Red Sea. Here we report the discovery of a buried site and more than 100 new surface scatters in the Dhofar region of Oman belonging to a regionally-specific African lithic industry - the late Nubian Complex - known previously only from the northeast and Horn of Africa during Marine Isotope Stage 5, ~1128,000 to 74,000 years ago. Two optically stimulated luminescence age estimates from the open-air site of Aybut Al Auwal in Oman place the Arabian Nubian Complex at ~106,000 years ago, providing archaeological evidence for the presence of a distinct northeast African Middle Stone Age technocomplex in southern Arabia sometime in the first half of Marine Isotope Stage 5.
-- : Rose JI, Usik VI, Marks AE, Hilbert YH, Galletti CS, et al. (2011) The Nubian Complex of Dhofar, Oman: An African Middle Stone Age Industry in Southern Arabia. PLoS ONE 6(11):
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" The timing of the dispersal of anatomically modern humans (AMH) out of Africa is a fundamental question in human evolutionary studies. Existing data suggest a rapid coastal exodus via the Indian Ocean rim around 60,000 years ago. We present evidence from Jebel Faya, United Arab Emirates, demonstrating human presence in eastern Arabia during the last interglacial. The tool kit found at Jebel Faya has affinities to the late Middle Stone Age in northeast Africa, indicating that technological innovation was not necessary to facilitate migration into Arabia. Instead, we propose that low eustatic sea level and increased rainfall during the transition between marine isotope stages 6 and 5 allowed humans to populate Arabia. This evidence implies that AMH may have been present in South Asia before the Toba eruption (1).

"Every single type found on the Rub al-Khali sites can be matched with specimens from the Fayum (Caton-Thompson and Gardner, 1934) or Kharga (Caton-Thompson, 1952), and many occur outside these localities...There are affinities both with the Neolithic of the Sahara and of Mesopotamia and with the Doian of Somalia." See F.E.Zeuner in The Neolithic Sites of Rub al-Khali, Man, No. 209, September 1954."
--Simon J. Armitage, et al 2011.. The Southern Route “Out of Africa”: Evidence for an Early Expansion of Modern Humans into Arabia. Science 28. Vol. 331 no. 6016 pp. 453-456
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[anastasiaescrava]

Most of us already knew along with the extensive research from Dana Marniche, this seals the deal.

[djoser-xyyman]

outdated interpretation, using frequency to determine ORIGIN.