Green Arabia: 120,000 years old footprints provide snapshot of past ecology

With an international research consortium, we have succeeded in obtaining high-resolution information from fossilized human and animal footprints that are about 120,000 years old about the environmental conditions of that time in the interior of the Arabian Peninsula. The finds are the oldest securely dated record of humans, presumably Homo sapiens, in this part of the world. They show that human and animal migrations and landscape use were closely linked and strongly underline the importance of Arabia for the study of human prehistory.