An 85,000-year-old fossilized finger bone found in Saudi Arabia and announced by archaeologists on Monday seems to suggest humans left Africa and the Levant area much earlier than previously thought.
Genetic research had led experts to believe humans left Africa around 60,000 years ago, but the finger bone and other recent finds have shown the dispersal was earlier and wider.
These finds, including 80,000-year-old human teeth in Asia and 65,000-year-old human relics from Australia, show a single migration out of Africa was unlikely, and that a wider dispersal into multiple areas was more likely, The New York Times reported.
The finding was published in the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
"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," said lead author Dr. Huw Croucutt of the University of Oxford. "The ability of these early people to widely colonize this region casts doubt on long held views that early dispersals out of Africa were localized and unsuccessful."
The team had been searching the Saudi Arabian desert for more than 10 years without finding human fossils. The finger bone was originally found in 2016, but had to be studied extensively and compared with other early fossils from nonhuman primates and Neanderthals so researchers could conclusively say it was a homo sapien bone, the Times reported.
“This fossil is just a piece of a whole skeleton, like a drop of rain,” Ahmad Bahameem of the Saudi Geological Survey said, the Times reported. “But the rain is coming,” he said, suggesting there would be further discoveries there.
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