“Ancient Innovation: UAE Archaeologists Uncover 80,000-Year-Old Secrets of Early Tool Makers”
Now, the hunt is on for prehistoric human remains that can directly link these artifacts to the people who made them.
Researchers Excavate The Jebel Faya Archaeological Site
Around 130,000 years ago, a long period of favorable climate conditions began in Arabia, attracting prehistoric populations. A team of researchers recently set out to look for evidence of this human occupation.
Led by Dr. Knut Bretzke from Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany, the researchers set their sights on Jebel Faya, a 210,000-year-old archaeological site in the United Arab Emirates that has been undergoing excavations since 2003.
K. Bretzke et al.The location of the Jebel Faya archaeological site, where 80,000-year-old stone blades were recently found.
Together, the researchers created an excavation plan that involved shifting through sediment from the site’s trenches. Once the sediment was collected, it was examined via Loss on Ignition, a method that measures the weight change of a sample after it’s heated to a high temperature. This allowed researchers to view the chemical makeup of the rocks and pinpoint their approximate age.
However, the most important finding was the discovery of a cache of stone tools and blades — the oldest evidence to date of the systematic production of stone blades on the Arabian Peninsula.
Prehistoric Tools And Weapons Are Unearthed From The Sand
In their study, now published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, the international researchers described the unearthing of a large collection of stone tools.
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