Saudi Arabia ’s Commission for Tourism and National Heritage has claimed that its team of archaeologists – in collaboration with researcher from Oxford University – have unearthed a 90,000 - year - old human ivory close to the northerly Saudi townspeople of Tayma . Said to be the mediate section of a middle finger , the breakthrough – if substantiate – indicate that humans left Africa at least 30,000 years in the beginning than previously thought .
According to ceremonious wisdom , humanity made its first ocean trip out of Africa around 60,000 years ago – some 140,000 years afterHomo sapiensfirst emerged . However , Saudi Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz hurl cold water over this theory whenannouncing the new findingduring a recent lecture at the French Academie des Beaux Arts .
Not only would the bone play the honest-to-goodness human body part ever unearth , it also rewrites the total migratory history of our species . However , while the uncovering would indeed suggest thatHomo sapienshad reached the Arabian Peninsula sooner than theOut of Africa hypothesisallows , it does n’t justify the outlandish call made by Ali Ghabban , head of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage , that the relic proves that human life dates back 325,000 years .
The discovery could also aid researchers clarify the itinerary that mankind took whenleaving Africa . At nowadays , there are two major schools of thought on this issue , with some scholars think that our ancestors embark Eurasia via Egypt and Sinai , while others suggest that they travel through Ethiopia and Arabia .
Although no bones belong to modern humans have yet been discovered anywhere in the world that predate this determination , the cadaver of other extinctHomospecies have been bump . The oldest of these is a jawbone – complete with a run-in of teeth – that was discovered in Ethiopia and is believed to be2.8 million years old . Researchers have yet to nail just which early human coinage the os belong to , though it shares a number of characteristic with bothHomo habilisandAustralopithecus afarensis .
