Prehistory
Prehistoric migration of Homo sapiens is likely to have taken place around 100,000 years ago and to have followed the coastlines from Africa along Yemen and the sea shores of Oman. Archaeological sites in Yemen and Oman have yielded a stone tool style that is distinct from the East African tradition. That raises the possibility that humans were established on the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula beginning as far back as 100,000 years ago or more. The oldest Home sapiens, known as H. sapiens idaltu, was found to be 160,000 years old, found at the Middle Awash site in Ethiopia. Then between 80k-125 k years ago, modern humans began appearing in the middle east.
The Negrito represent the first migration of anatomically modern Homo sapiens out of Africa while the Arab with the Brown skin are Veddoids who are the descendants of the second wave of migration back from Persian side after the flood 7,000 years ago. The departure of mankind from Africa to colonise the rest of the world involved them crossing the Straits of Bab el Mandab in the southern Red Sea and moving along the green coastlines around Arabia and thence to the rest of Eurasia. That crossing became possible when sea level had fallen by more than 80 m to expose much of the shelf between southern Eritrea and Yemen; a level that was reached during a glacial stadial from 60 to 70 ka as climate cooled erratically to reach the last glacial maximum. From 135,000 to 90,000 years ago tropical Africa had megadroughts which drove the humans from the land towards the sea shores and forced them to cross over to other continents.The researchers used radiocarbon dating techniques on pollen grains trapped in lake bottom mud to establish vegetation over the ages of the Malawi lake in Africa. The researchers took samples at 300-year-intervals. Samples from the megadrought times had little pollen or charcoal, suggesting sparse vegetation with little to burn. The area around Lake Malawi, which today is heavily forested was a desert 135,000 to 90,000 years ago.
There have been discoveries of Palaeolithic stone tools in caves in southern and central Oman, and in the United Arab Emirates close to the Straits of Hormuz at the outlet of the Persian Gulf (UAE site (Jebel Faya), Ref: Armitage, S.J. et al. 2011. Ref2: The southern route ‘out of Africa’: evidence for an early expansion of modern humans into Arabia. Science, v. 331, p. 453-456). The stone tools, some up to 125,000 years old, resemble those made by humans in Africa around the same period.
Luminescence dating is a technique that measures naturally occurring radiation stored in the sand. Luminescence dating data showed that 130,000 years ago, the Arabian Peninsula was relatively more warm which caused more rainfall, turning it into a series of lush habitable land. During this period the southern Red Sea’s levels dropped and was only 2.5 miles or 4 km wide. This offered a brief window of time for humans to easily cross the sea and cross the Peninsula to opposing sites like Jebel Faya. These early migrants running away from the climate change in Africa, crossed the Red Sea into Yemen and Oman, trekked across Arabia during favourable climate conditions. 2,000 kilometres of inhospitable desert lie between the Red Sea and Jebel Faya in UAE. But around 130,000 years ago the world was at the end of an ice age. The Red Sea was shallow enough to be crossed on foot or on a small raft, and the Arabian peninsula was being transformed from a parched desert into a green land.
Read more about this topic: History Of Oman