The nature of human dispersals out of Africa has remained elusive because of the poor resolution of paleoecological data in direct association with remains of the earliest non-African people. Here, we report hominin and non-hominin mammalian tracks from an ancient lake deposit in the Arabian Peninsula, dated within the last interglacial. The findings, it is argued, likely represent the oldest securely dated evidence for Homo sapiens in Arabia. The paleoecological evidence indicates a well-watered semi-arid grassland setting during human movements into the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia. We conclude that visitation to the lake was transient, likely serving as a place to drink and to forage, and that late Pleistocene human and mammalian migrations and landscape use patterns in Arabia were inexorably linked.

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Tool use can be considered in terms of purposeful behaviour. This emphasis on ‘purpose’ hides a host of assumptions about the nature of cognition and its relationship with physical activity. In particular, a notion of ‘purpose’ might assume that this is teleological which, in turn, requires a model of a desired end state of an action that can be projected onto the environment. Such a model is fundamental to traditional descriptions of cognition and a version of this can be found in the ‘template’ theory of stone-tool production (i.e. where the maker of the tool has a model in mind and attempts to reproduce this model in stone). Against this cognitive perspective, a number of approaches have been proposed that share their roots in the work of Gibson (i.e. ecological psychology) or Bernstein (i.e. dynamic systems). From these perspectives, ‘purpose’ is not a matter of a projection but opportunity; put simply, an action is performed until it need not be performed further. Trivial though this might sound, it has implications for how we define purpose and how this might apply to our understanding of tool use. We argue from a dynamic systems perspective and demonstrate the use of tools to crack bones for marrow extraction.