Expand (charge: Stewart et al. 2020)
Approximately 120,000 decades back, a couple of individuals walked along the shore of a shallow river at what is now northern Saudi Arabia. They left {} seven footprints in the sand, and now those paths would be the earliest known proof of the species’ existence in Arabia.
A Pleistocene stroll from the lake
Imagine that you are a believer roughly 120,000 decades before, and you are walking from eastern Africa to Eurasia. Paleoanthropologists are still wondering why you have resolved to do anything, and you probably do not need a destination in mind, but for today we will take it for granted that you only wish to have a really, really long stroll. Almost inevitably, you will visit the Levant, around the eastern end of the Mediterranean. From this major geographical crossroads, you have got some choices: you can go north through Syria and Turkey, then veer west to Asia or west to Europe. You can also hit west coast, around the northern end of the Arabian Peninsula.
This was a much better alternative then than it seems today. On and off throughout the Pleistocene, the Arabian Peninsula had a more moderate climate than it does now. Evidence from historical sediments, pollen, and animal fossils {} that the hills were grasslands and forests, crossed by rivers and dotted with lakes such as the one in Alathar from the american Nefud Desert.
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