Finger bone discovery believed to be from the oldest modern human found in Arabia

Griffith University played a key role in the team behind new research published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution that describes the discovery of a fossil human finger bone at the site of Al Wusta, an ancient freshwater lake located in what is now the hyper-arid Nefud Desert, in Saudi Arabia.
The fossil has been directly dated to approximately 90,000 years ago, which makes it among the oldest modern human remains found outside Africa and the Levant.
The work, led by Dr Huw Groucutt the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, involved an international team from Saudi Arabia, including the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage and the Saudi Geological Survey, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Australia. Professor Rainer Grün and Drs Julien Louys and Mathieu Duval of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE) at Griffith University were key participants in this

See Full Post >>