For Kuwait, stung by the recent suggestion by Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday, that cartographers should redraw maps to show the oil-rich emirate as no more that a province of “greater Iraq”, the discovery of its possible 7,000 year old heritage could not have come at a better time. Subiya Man is already being heralded as “the first Kuwaiti”, even though human remains have yet to be found in the sand.
The Subiya site in Kuwait yielded pieces of bitumen from 5,000BC, evidence of early boat building, while archaeoligists were unearthing a Neolithic human site
The model boat found at Subiya holds details of ancient construction methods