By Laura Geggel, Senior
Writer | April 9, 2018 02:17pm ET
A sliver of bone the size of a Cheeto may
radically revise our view of when and how humans left Africa.
The 85,000-year-old fossilized human finger
bone, unearthed in the Saudi Arabian desert, suggests that early humans took
completely different routes out of Africa than was previously suspected, a new
study finds.
The finding is the oldest human fossil on
record unearthed outside of Africa and the Levant (an area encompassing the
Eastern Mediterranean, including Israel), and the oldest human remains
uncovered in Saudi Arabia, the researchers said. [7 Bizarre
Ancient Cultures That History Forgot]
Until now, many scientists thought that early
humans left Africa about 60,000 years ago and then hugged the coastline, living
off marine resources, said study senior researcher Michael Petraglia, an
archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in
Jena, Germany.
"But now, with the fossil finger bone
from the site of Al Wusta in Saudi Arabia, we have a find that's 85,000 to
90,000 years old, which suggests that Homo sapiens is moving out of
Africa far earlier than 60,000 years ago," Petraglia told reporters at a
news conference. "This supports a model not of a single, rapid dispersal
out of Africa 60,000 years ago, but a much more complicated scenario of
migration."
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