Fossil finger bone of Homo sapiens from the Al Wusta site, Saudi Arabia.IAN CARTWRIGHT
A fossilized Homo sapiens finger bone discovered by archaeologists working in the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia in 2016 is approximately 88,000 years old, according to a study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution today (April 9). This is the oldest human fossil found outside of Africa and the Levant—the region that includes modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan. It indicates that humans dispersed from Africa sooner than archaeologists previously believed.
“This discovery for the first time conclusively shows that early members of our species colonized an expansive region of southwest Asia and were not just restricted to the Levant,” says study coauthor Huw Groucutt, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford in the U.K., in a statement. “The ability of these early people to ...
