New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis

Abstract

The emerging picture of prehistoric Arabia suggests that early modern humans were able to survive periodic hyperarid oscillations by contracting into environmental refugia around the coastal margins of the peninsula. This paper reviews new paleoenvironmental, archaeological, and genetic evidence from the Arabian Peninsula and southern Iran to explore the possibility of a demographic refugium dubbed the "Gulf Oasis," which is posited to have been a vitally significant zone for populations residing in southwest Asia during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. These data are used to assess the role of this large oasis, which, before being submerged beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, was well watered by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Batin rivers as well as subterranean aquifers flowing beneath the Arabian subcontinent. Inverse to the amount of annual precipitation falling across the interior, reduced sea levels periodically exposed large portions of the Arabo-Persian Gulf, equal at times to the size of Great Britain. Therefore, when the hinterlands were desiccated, populations could have contracted into the Gulf Oasis to exploit its freshwater springs and rivers. This dynamic relationship between environmental amelioration/desiccation and marine transgression/ regression is thought to have driven demographic exchange into and out of this zone over the course of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, as well as having played an important role in shaping the cultural evolution of local human populations during that interval. For Dilmun, the land of my lady's heart, I will create long waterways, rivers and canals, whereby water will flow to quench the thirst of all beings and bring abundance to all that lives. (The promise of Enki the Lord of Sweet Waters to Ninhursag the Earth Mother, from the Sumerian creation myth "Enki and Ninhursag"; Kramer 1945) Introduction: Out of Africa and Into Arabia? The investigation presented in this paper commences with the question of human expansion from Africa into Arabia during the Late Pleistocene (128,000-12,000 BP). Scholars often envision South Arabia as a population corridor, drawing on evidence from archaeozoology (

A multi-proxy analysis of the Holocene humid phase from the United Arab Emirates and its implications for southeast Arabia's Neolithic populations

“…The paucity of archaeological material means opinions are currently divided regarding the subsistence base of these early populations. Whilst some authors link the archaeological finds from this period to mobile herder-gatherers (Drechsler, 2009), others suggest they were left by huntergatherer populations (Charpentier, 2008;Rose, 2010) whose footprint on the landscape is likely to be less visible today. Furthermore, it is suggested that huntergather groups are more likely to have concentrated in areas of the landscape with greater ecological diversity and resource availability, which during the earliest Holocene is more likely to have been within the now submerged Arabian Gulf basin or within the al-Hajar Mountains and the alluvial piedmont bahadas.…”

Out-of-Africa, the peopling of continents and islands: tracing uniparental gene trees across the map

“…Five such claims currently vie for attention, all with date brackets similar to those of the Levant exit, four with fossils and one with cultural evidence. The latter is at Jebel Faya on the Arabian Peninsula, where lithics with affinities to the Late Middle Stone Age in northeast Africa date between 127 ka and 95 ka [18] (reviewed by Petraglia et al [16]; Rose [72]). …”

Cultural and human dynamics in southern Arabia at the end of the Middle Paleolithic

“…A discontinuous occupation of the Arabian Peninsula during the Middle Paleolithic is also suggested by a high technological diversity (Petraglia and Alsharekh, 2003;Rose, 2007a;Crassard, 2008;Petraglia and Rose, 2009;Delagnes et al, 2012) whose significance (diachronic changes vs. regional synchronic diversity) remains however questionable since it relies on few dated and stratified records. In between periods of moisture and hyper-aridity peaks, the Arabian populations endured a series of climate and environmental degradations which may have resulted in contractions of settlements into environmental refugia (Bailey, 2009;Rose and Petraglia, 2009;Rose, 2010). This environmental refugia model is prominent in the literature relating to the East African Middle Stone Age (Clark, 1989;Lahr and Foley, 1994;Ambrose, 1998;Basell, 2008), and is discussed in the context of the Azraq Basin in Jordan by Cordova et al (2013), but remains largely theoretical in the Arabian Peninsula during MIS 5, due the lack of chronological and environmental data from stratified archaeological contexts.…”