Bone fragment rewrites mankind’s African exodus

90,000-year-old finger could change our understanding of early human migration history

AN ANCIENT fragment of human finger bone found in the Saudi Arabian desert suggests that mankind ventured east out of Africa 30,000 years earlier than thought. The scrap of bone, measuring little more than an inch long, had lain undiscovered for up to 90,000 years.

Its discovery potentially revolutionises the understanding of early human history, challenging a long-held consensus that humans started to move en masse into Eurasia in a single wave around 60,000 years ago.

It is the latest in a series of archaeological finds that have questioned the conventional narrative, including the discovery of a jawbone in an Israeli cave, said to date back 180,000 years.

Huw Groucutt, the study’s co-author from the University of Oxford, said its age served as rare evidence that “our species was spreading beyond Africa much earlier than previously thought”.

The research team said the fossilised finger bone unquestionably belonged to a human and could be dated directly using radiometric technology.

It is the first fossil of a hominin – the group of humans and our direct ancestors. The fragment is thought to be the middle bone of a middle finger, likely that of an adult. It was discovered in the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia in 2016 and analysed over two years. Tests revealed it was at least 85,000 years old – and up to 90,000 – making it the “oldest directly-dated Homo sapiens” fossil found outside of Africa and the Levant.

Prof Michael Petraglia, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, said: “What we’re arguing here is that there were multiple dispersals out of Africa, so the process of the movement and the colonisation of Eurasia was far more complicated than our textbooks tell us.

“This find, together with other finds in the last few years, suggests that modern humans, Homo sapiens, were moving out of Africa multiple times during many windows of opportunity during the last 100,000 years or so.”

Humans were previously thought to have left Africa in a single wave, moving along the coast from Africa via southern Arabia and India all the way to Australia.

But Prof Petraglia said the finger showed “that modern humans were moving across the interior, the terrestrial heart, of Eurasia – not along the coastlines”.

It was found near to a collection of 380 stone tools, suggesting that groups of tens of humans would have been living at the site.

The research is published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.