Over 100 new sites classified as Nubian Middle Stone Age (MSA) have been found in the Dhofar Mountains of southern Oman according to an article published in the journal PLoS ONE. On November 30, 2011.
This is the first discovery of Nubian MSA tools outside of Africa and is indicative of one route that early men took in their migration from Africa to the rest of the European and Asian world.
Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating of the artifacts indicates an age of about 106,000 years. This is considerably older than present biological data that indicates men left Africa between 70,000 and 40,000 years ago.
The discovery is the first hard physical evidence that man left Africa much earlier than previously thought and is the result of over ten years of searching and research.
The sites are so far inland that the previous theory of coastal migration is also brought into serious doubt.
The climate in Arabia at the time was tropical. Plant and animal life were assumed to be abundant in the interior where the Nubian MSA sites were found.
The research was reviewed at the Eureka Alert web site on November 30, 2011, and is available at the PLoS ONE site here.
Paper
The Nubian Complex of Dhofar, Oman: An African Middle Stone Age Industry in Southern Arabia
Authors
Jeffrey I. Rose1*, Vitaly I. Usik2, Anthony E. Marks3, Yamandu H. Hilbert1, Christopher S. Galletti4, Ash Parton5, Jean Marie Geiling6, Viktor Černý7, Mike W. Morley5, Richard G. Roberts8
1 Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom, 2 Archaeological Museum, Institute of Archaeology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kiev, Ukraine, 3 Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, United States of America, 4 School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States of America, 5 Department of Anthropology and Geography, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom, 6 Institut für Naturwissenschaftliche Archäologie, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, 7 Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Science, Prague, Czech Republic, 8 Centre for Archaeological Science, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia
Citation: 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): e28239.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0028239
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