Staff writer, Al Arabiya EnglishThursday, 18 August 2016
Saudi Commission for Tourism & National Heritage has announced “the world’s oldest human bone” has been discovered during an excavation at Tayma in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, Al-Riyadh newspaper has reported.
The bone found is the middle part of the middle finger of a human being who lived 90,000 years ago, the oldest human trace found to date in the Arabian Peninsula, an official from the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (SCTNH) said.
Vice President of the Saudi commission Ali al-Ghabban said that the discovery was found by a joint research team of Saudi archaeologists and experts from Oxford University.
The project is part of the Green Arabia Project, which is a Saudi-British undertaking for survey and excavation to implement environmental and archaeological studies of many historical sites in Saudi Arabia.
Last Update: Friday, 19 August 2016 KSA 23:50 - GMT 20:50
I don’t know why they would ID that as the “oldest” modern human bone. There are finds in Africa that are much older (approaching 200,000 years) and a find in Israel dated about 130, 000 years. The Israel find has been interpreted as an early abortive migration out of Africa. It will be interesting to see how the Arabian find is interpreted, as part of an early abortive migration or possibly indicating an earlier persistent migration.
We need a comment from Jim ? , a paleoanthropologist who has written on Biologos before. I have forgotten his last name and lost his blog address in a computer meltdown. He would have some more informed comment I’m sure.
Hello. Sorry about the silence, but I have had some major health issues to deal with. Yes, the most current information suggests that the earliest modern humans that we have come from the site of Omo in the Afar triangle region of north Africa. These remains appear to be around 190,000 years old. The other notable site, also from that general vicinity, is Herto, which has given us remains that are around 165,000 years old. I am not sure why the headline would refer to 90,000-year-old remains as the earliest human fossils. I probably need to dig a little bit deeper to figure out what is going on with the report. What they may be getting at, is that these are the earliest human remains outside of the African continent. Even that is a stretch, however, because modern human remains have been found in China, that date to around 100,000 years old.
Well, I can’t read Arabic, which is the language of the original story, but the headline is clearly wrong. In any event, stone tools associated with modern humans have been found in the Arabian Peninsula that are at least 100,000 years old.