Neanderthals May Have Walked Into the Saudi Arabian Desert 55,000 Years Ago, Much Farther South Than Anyone Thought

A new study of stone tools from Saudi Arabia’s Nefud Desert argues that Neanderthals may have lived there some 55,000 years ago, much farther south than researchers believed. No bones have turned up to confirm it, and the case rests on the shape of the tools themselves.

The research was published online on August 12 in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. It centers on an archaeological site beside an ancient lake near the city of Jubbah, and it hints that Neanderthals may have occupied more open, arid environments than the picture we have of them allows.

That picture has been shifting for years. Neanderthals have traditionally been seen as a cold-adapted, mostly European species, but evidence has already placed them thousands of miles east in Siberia, as well as in the Middle East. Arabia would push the map further still.

Tools Without Bones

The site at the heart of the study is Jebel Katefeh-1, known as JKF-1. No Neanderthal bones have ever been found in Arabia, so researchers were left wondering who had been making tools there in the first place.

Lacking bones or DNA, the paper turned to the flakes themselves. They measured hundreds of sharp pieces struck from a carefully prepared stone core, gathered from JKF-1 and from other sites across Arabia, the Levant and northeast Africa. Using statistical techniques, they compared flake shapes across time and space, then built a model from sites where the toolmakers’ identities were well established. The aim was to sort a group of tools into Neanderthal or Homo sapiens work.

When the model was applied to the JKF-1 tools, and to those from a smaller nearby site called ALM-3, the results showed it was far more likely that Neanderthals had made them.

“Our findings extend the Neanderthal range much further south than had been known, and into the much more open environments of Arabia,” said study co-lead author Huw Groucutt, an archaeologist at the University of Malta, in an email to Live Science.

When Were Neanderthals There?

Earlier work had dated the tools to somewhere between 90,000 and 50,000 years ago, which is a pretty wide window. To narrow it, the team dug a new trench at the site and dated grains of sand from the soil using optically stimulated luminescence, a method that reveals how long ago those grains were last exposed to sunlight.

The tools sat in a layer where older desert sand gave way to younger lake sediment, showing that people were at JKF-1 around 55,000 years ago, just as the desert was turning wetter. Neanderthals were the only group living in southwest Asia at that time. That date, together with the shape of the tools, is why the researchers think Neanderthals were responsible.

Knut Bretzke, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany who wasn’t involved in the study, said that the shift in climate may explain the visit. Drawing on his own fieldwork in southern Arabia, he said the wet spell may have drawn grazing animals into the desert interior, and Neanderthals would likely have followed them.

Plausible, but Not Proven

Bretzke called the study’s evidence for a Neanderthal presence in northern Arabia compelling. He still said the underlying assumptions deserve scrutiny. Several of the comparison sites used in the computer model are surface sites, where artifacts can pile up over vast stretches of time instead of being discarded during a single occupation, he told to the same source material. He nonetheless finds the paper’s conclusion plausible. For the moment, the evidence remains indirect.

“Do I believe there were any Neanderthals in northern Saudi Arabia? Yes,” Bretzke said. “Do I think we have solid evidence to prove that belief? No.”

Groucutt agreed that a fossil would help settle the question. He noted, however, that bones and ancient DNA preserve poorly in Arabia’s heat, so stone tools currently provide archaeologists’ best window into the region’s deep past.