Inside the Umm Jirsan lava-tube cave, researchers have found evidence of human occupation dating back 10,000 years.Credit: Green Arabia Project
Posted on 04/23/2024 9:08:48 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
...In the past decade, satellite data and fossil finds have suggested that the Arabian Peninsula was not always an arid desert. Periods when the region contained lakes and lush greenery might have drawn people and animals there from Africa, according to the study's authors... in 2018, Stewart and his colleagues described an 88,000-year-old finger bone from the Saudi Arabian desert2 — one of the oldest human fossils found outside of Africa. And in 2020, they described footprints on a lake shore dating back around 120,000 years...
The researchers turned to caves under Harrat Khaybar, a vast basalt plain pocked with volcanic craters...
An excavation near the entrance of one cave produced more than 600 animal and human bones and 44 stone-tool fragments. The oldest stone tools dated back to as many as 10,000 years ago, and the oldest human bone fragments were almost 7,000 years old...
The distribution of samples suggests that people did not live in the cave for long periods, but stayed there occasionally. Nearby rock art depicts people with goats and sheep. The drawings are difficult to date, but they support the fossil evidence that people used the cave as a place to rest and shelter their herds. Even today, farmers seek shade and water in underground lava tubes for themselves and their animals, says Stewart...
Across Harrat Khaybar are paths spanning hundreds of kilometres, some flanked with stone tombs dating back around 4,500 years. Kennedy says the routes were probably used even earlier than the dating of the tombs would suggest...
UPDATES & CORRECTIONS
Correction 18 April 2024: An earlier version of this story attributed a statement about funding Saudi archaeological research to Ahmed Nassr. This attribution was incorrect and the statement has been removed.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
Inside the Umm Jirsan lava-tube cave, researchers have found evidence of human occupation dating back 10,000 years.Credit: Green Arabia Project
They must be very old by now.....................
Think of how that place must smell...
And full of ....................stuff................
Be careful where you dig!
what a shame that the radical Islamics have killed off all the civilized population, they could have made a contribution to humanity and progress what with a 10,000 year head start
I’m glad you said it, I really wanted to but restrained myself.
whats even more shameful is those crazy idiots went into museums in Iraq and destroyed antiquities there, too.
Democracy is messy?
not sure what you are referring to . i mentioned the physical act of destruction
It’s what Donald Rumsfeld famously said after the looting of the museum and other buildings.
i didnt know that but im not surprised. i always thought he was a evil person and he gave me the shivers. he was corrupt to the bone
That’s a nice cave.
understood. Iraq as Babylonia has a very long history, with different peoples and cultures.
Some of which influenced our Biblical traditions (as with Abraham originating in Ur and with, of course, the Babylonian exile).
The Fakestinian Occupiers of the Temple Mount have been digging under their buildings there and destroying as much archeology as they can from the periods of the first and second Jewish Temples. They not only make up a completely false “narrative” or fake history for themselves — fake by all accounts including Arab/Muslim records up until the 1960/70 era when the Soviet Union’s communist KGB wrote them their current pack of lies....
But they instinctively realize that they also must destroy the histories and all archeological record of the Jewish and Christian past (if only to “clear the field” for their bullsheit fake “Palestinian narrative”)
They’re as evil as Hell and it is not too much of a stretch, imho, to view them as Satan’s direct agents in the world today.
And even if one doesn’t care about the history. And if one doesn’t care about Judeo-Christian faith or western civilization, it is still imperative to thoroughly defeat these aggressive primitives as they are, regretfully, very dangerous to innocent human beings everywhere today.
It is sad. It is discouraging that any people anywhere at any time could be so evil. But, it is part of reality and we cannot survive if we continue to hide from it, deny it, or try to “negotiate” with it. Negotiations only work when the other party is honest and coming to talk in good will.
That’s patently not present with the Fakestinians or Iranians or .... they simply have to be defeated, period, end of file.
(Reality is not a completely pleasant place, not since the expulsion from Eden anyway. I pray and trust that things will get there again, but for the present we just have to deal with it as best possible and definitely not running away or hiding from or deny the evil that exists.)
There’s remains of a giant spider way up in the back, but other than that...
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