This map shows the archaeological excavation sites where identical stone tools have turned up inside and outside of Africa—smoking gun evidence of Homo sapiens on the move.
In the late 1990s, geneticists screened the genetic markers of many different ethnic populations for evidence of shared ancestry. What they found suggested that the first wave of Homo sapiens left Africa and reached Arabia around 60,000 years ago—following the coastlines to get there.
But if this was true, where was the fossil evidence?
Though archaeologist Jeff Rose scoured the coastlines of Oman for years, he found no signs modern humans had ever passed this way—leaving the possibility that all traces could have been submerged by rising sea levels.
He switched his search in-land. Discovering archaeological evidence in blistering hot deserts is a massive challenge, not least because sand storms and high temperatures can erode human remains. But in 2010, on the very last day of that year’s fieldwork, Jeff and his team hit the jackpot.
They discovered a distinctive stone spear tip of a type previously only found within Africa’s Nile Valley: it was a Nubian Point. And aged 106,000 years old, it overturned the genetic evidence suggesting migration had occurred 60,000 years ago.
To date, over 800 Nubian artifacts have been found in Oman—stone “breadcrumbs” that help plot the route taken into Arabia.