Stone Tools Suggest Neanderthals Reached the Arabian Desert 60,000 Years Ago

Neanderthals are usually pictured in the cold landscapes of Eurasia, but a new study argues they may also have roamed the warmer deserts of Arabia between about 60,000 and 50,000 years ago. Published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, the work links Neanderthal tool-making methods to artefacts from a site called Jebel Katefeh-1, beside an ancient lake in Saudi Arabia's Nefud Desert. No Neanderthal bones have ever been found in Arabia, so the argument rests entirely on stone tools.

Fossils are scarce in the region, which makes stone tools the main clue to which populations lived there. Both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals moved through nearby Southwest Asia between roughly 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, and Arabia sat as a crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia during the Ice Age. Tools at different Arabian sites vary in ways researchers have struggled to explain, because climate, geography, the type of stone and population history can all leave their mark.

To separate those factors, the team built a reference dataset of 704 complete prepared stone flakes from across Africa, Arabia and the Levant, spanning 100,000 to 50,000 years ago. Their statistical tests distinguished flakes tied to Homo sapiens from those tied to Neanderthals with more than 93% agreement, and found that population history best explained the differences in flake shape. The Jebel Katefeh-1 tools matched Neanderthal assemblages, with a median Neanderthal likelihood of 78% for the key shape pattern; only four artefacts looked more likely to be from Homo sapiens.

The team also re-dated the site's sediments using luminescence dating, a method that estimates when grains were last exposed to sunlight, narrowing the age to about 60,000 to 50,000 years ago from an earlier, broader range. The authors write that interbreeding between the two groups could therefore have taken place over a wide area that includes Arabia.