At first the signs were subtle. A banana tree was stripped of ripe fruit. Papaya and watermelon vanished. A machete went missing. Clothes hanging off a scarecrow disappeared.

The indigenous villagers who hunt and farm manioc in small clearings here already knew they were not alone. The oldest among them remember growing up naked and on the move, living off the bounty of the Amazon rainforest. But their cousins who remained in the jungle typically avoided all contact with outsiders.

Now, the villagers along the muddy banks of the Curanja River, which snakes for 200 kilometers through the rainforest of eastern Peru, are reporting not just signs of the mysterious forest people, but frequent sightings and even raids. “Since 2011, there have been regular incidents with the naked ones,” says Delicia Roque Samuel, 42, speaking in her native Huni Kuin language through an interpreter. Last year, women watched strangers take bananas from their gardens, and a girl picking lemons saw a naked man across the river, motioning her to come with him. When villagers all along the river canoed downstream to vote in regional elections last October, people in three villages returned to find their houses ransacked by isolated people who had previously avoided contact.

Samuel, who lives in the small settlement of Nueva Vida, points to one side of her thatched hut. “They broke this wall, entered, and took pots, pans, clothes, mosquito nets, and hammocks. … We are scared now to go very far, and I’ve planted a garden closer to my house.”

The villagers empathize with their forest-dwelling cousins and say the isolated people “harvest” rather than “steal” goods. But their patience is wearing thin. “The next time,” warns Nolso Torres Prado, head of a village that was abandoned entirely after the October raids, “I will kill them.”

The tension extends beyond this remote corner of eastern Peru. A surge in sightings and raids in both Peru and Brazil may be a sign that some of the world’s last peoples living outside the global economy are emerging. “No one knows what is happening” within these groups, says Francisco Estremadoyro, director of the Lima-based nonprofit ProPurús, which promotes sustainable development in the region. “But there is no question that this is a historic moment.”

Centuries of history show how contact can go wrong. The events along the Curanja are the last, lingering echoes of the collision of cultures that began in 1492, in which an estimated 50 million to 100 million native people perished and entire cultures vanished. Now, anthropologists and officials wonder if they can minimize the human toll of this final act. Lacking immunity to common pathogens and requiring large tracts of intact forest for food, medicines, and materials, the isolated tribes “are some of the world’s most vulnerable people,” says Beatriz Huertas, an anthropologist based in Lima who has extensively studied the groups.

The primary danger is disease transmitted by outsiders such as loggers, miners, missionaries, drug traffickers, and even television crews. These groups threaten tribes and the rainforest on which they depend in other ways, too. In some instances, outsiders have violently attacked isolated peoples. Even well-intentioned gifts like a flashlight —which requires toxic batteries and transforms the night— may disrupt traditional ways of life.

On paper, the solutions seem straight-forward: vaccinations for both forest tribes who emerge and those who contact them, medical care in remote locations, limits on the transfer of modern technologies, and reserves that prevent outsiders from exploiting isolated peoples. But if recent incidents along the Curanja are any guide, the Peruvian government is unprepared to cope with forest people’s emergence in remote corners of the Amazon. “There is a time bomb in the Curanja,” says Chris Fagan, executive director of the Upper Amazon Conservancy (UAC), a U.S. based nonprofit that works closely with ProPurús to preserve ecological and cultural diversity. Adds Estremadoyro: “We are on the threshold of large extinctions of cultures.”

Epa straddles life between
the rainforest and the village.

ONE THOUSAND KILOMETERS WEST of the Curanja, across the Andes mountains in Peru’s capital of Lima, cultures hidden deep in the jungle seem like a distant dream or even a fantasy. More than 95% of the country’s population lives in the mountains or along the coast, and until recently government officials dismissed isolated forest peoples as fanciful—a stark contrast with policies in neighboring Brazil.

“The figure of the uncontacted native jungle dweller” is a fiction created by environmentalists eager to halt oil and gas development in the Amazon, Peru’s then President Alan García said in 2007. That same year, Daniel Saba, who headed the state-owned oil company Perupetro, called it “absurd to say that there are uncontacted peoples when no one has seen them.” Carlos Mora Bernasconi, an anthropologist at Peru’s powerful Ministry of Energy and Mines in Lima, insists that other anthropologists and indigenous groups intentionally skew results to stop development.

As reports of contacts proliferate, however, the reality of at least some isolated tribes has become impossible to ignore. In August 2013, some 100 armed members of the Mashco Piro, an isolated tribe that lives primarily in national parks in eastern Peru, appeared near the community of Monte Salvado and made threatening gestures. Then, last fall, some 100 Mashco Piro warriors raided the village while most inhabitants were away, killing dogs and chickens, smashing windows, and destroying clothes. The four remaining community members fled. On 1 May, south of the Curanja and just outside Manu National Park, Mashco Piro men shot an arrow that killed a 20-year-old indigenous villager.

Continue reading main article

THE POISONED NECKLACE

Marcelino Pinedo Cecilio
can still remember life
as a child living
in the rainforest.

One day in the early 1950s, when he was a young child living with his family in the Amazon rainforest, Marcelino Pinedo Cecilio encountered his first outsiders. At the sight of light-skinned people who wore clothes, “my mother grabbed me and we ran into the forest,” recalls the 69-year-old.

Not long after, a man whom Cecilio remembers as a German anthropologist visited their isolated village on the upper Curanja River in this remote corner
of the Amazon. (Anthropologists say the visitor may have been ethnographer and photographer Harald Schultz, who worked for what later became FUNAI, the Brazilian governmental agency that protects indigenous people.) “We were naked,” Cecilio says. “He came with machetes, mosquito nets, axes, and clothes.” The visitor stayed 1 night before heading upriver, then returned a couple of weeks later, leaving behind a necklace of fish bones as a gift. Soon after, villagers developed a sore throat and burning fever. Cecilio estimates that 200 people died and the tribe scattered. “We were so weak, and some vanished into the forest.” The tribe blamed the necklace, thinking it was poisoned.

Cecilio remembers growing up in a huge long house with dozens of families. They grew manioc, yucca, peanuts, corn, and jungle potato, sometimes using a root with spines to clear fields. They made arrows using bamboo, sharpening points with the teeth of a large rodent. “We kept good relations with other tribe members who lived in the area, celebrating together and holding competitive games as well,” he says. The brief visit from the outside spelled an end to that life. Like so many indigenous peoples since the arrival of the Portuguese and Spanish here in the 16th century, Cecilio’s group was likely struck down by  a common Western disease—maybe influenza or whooping cough—inadvertently carried by the visitor. It is an old story: Within a year of the arrival  of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his smallpox-carrying troops in 1519, for example, half the population of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán perished, historians estimate. Today’s isolated tribes are in the same position as those New World peoples 5 centuries ago, with immune systems naive to such pathogens, says Lima-based anthropologist Beatriz Huertas. “They are particularly susceptible to respiratory and eye diseases,” she says.

In the past century, American missionaries, anthropologists, and loggers brought the pathogens. Now, drug traffickers and television crews play that role. In Manu National Park, just south of where Cecilio lives, at least four people of the Matsiguenka forest community died in an epidemic in 2007. A 2008 report
by Peruvian anthropologist Daniel Rodriguez links the illness to a visit by a film crew who wanted to include the Matsiguenka in the popular British series World’s Lost Tribes: New Adventures of Mark and Ollie. Rodriguez concluded that the crew strayed beyond the area included in their permits, which were designed to avoid such transmissions.

The company denied both charges. As increasing numbers of isolated people emerge from the forest, their risk of disease is growing. Finding ways to protect them is an urgent concern anthropologists say.

Today, Cecilio again lives along the Curanja, where he makes feathered headbands and cultivates a garden. This spring, he shared his knowledge of traditional plant medicines with a visiting German biologist.

Despite the bitter memories, Cecilio’s gentle smile radiates kindness. Asked whether he misses his youthful days in the forest, he doesn’t hesitate. “No!” he says firmly. He would like to find a way to talk with the peoples still in isolation. “I want them to know there is another way of life.” ■

Villagers along the Curanja
paint traditional designs using
local plant dyes.

Other regions, such as the mountains of New Guinea and the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, are also home to isolated peoples. But by far the largest numbers are found across the Amazon. And it is in Peru that the situation appears most dire, with large numbers of isolated people—Huertas estimates as many as 8000, scattered in small bands—and a history of neglect.

These are not the uncontacted people of romantic imagination. Most of these groups had traumatic interactions with industrial society about a century ago, when the upper Amazon filled with tens of thousands of outsiders eager to make a fortune from rubber. The difficult and dirty work of tapping the white sap from rubber trees was assigned to indigenous people, who long ago had learned to use the sap to make waterproof shoes or balls. In return, the tribes often received only basic supplies like hammocks, machetes, and clothes; they lived in what amounted to slavery. Scholars estimate that as many as 250,000 natives in Peru and Brazil, or one in 10, died.

Some tribes escaped into the forest, relying on deep knowledge of the ecosystem for all of their needs. They fashioned bows and arrows from local materials to kill game, made poisons to fish, and used diverse plants for medicine and ceremonies. Some groups abandoned traditional skills such as farming and canoe construction in order to avoid detection, Huertas says. She ticks off the forces that may now be forcing isolated people from their hideouts: food shortages, intertribal conflicts, illegal loggers, and oil and gas exploration. Peru is the world’s top producer of illegal cocaine and exports much of it to Brazil, with the remote Amazon jungle serving as a smuggling route. Isolated peoples “are being pushed to the last remnants of intact forest in the headwaters, the most secluded areas,” says ProPurús Director Estremadoyro during an interview in Lima. “They are already in the deepest jungle they can find.”

Peru is at last acknowledging the crisis. “Until a few years ago, the government denied their existence, but now it is finally instituting policies to protect them,” Huertas says. In recent years, the Peruvian government has set aside 3 million hectares in five reserves as safe havens and has forbidden efforts to contact isolated peoples. In a small office she shares with a half-dozen co-workers within Lima’s modernist concrete Ministry of Culture, Lorena Prieto leads the effort to add another five reserves. Teams are in the field now to gather evidence on the location and numbers of isolated peoples—and to understand their emergence. Prieto acknowledges the role of mining and logging, but says “there is something else at play here, though there’s not enough research yet to know what.”

Journeys into the tribes’ last refuges are measured not in kilometers but in turns of the river.

“MALOCA!” SAYS UAC’S FAGAN, his index finger jabbing at the window. “There!” For the previous hour, passengers on a 10-seater charter prop plane have seen only unbroken green jungle and sinuous brown rivers. Now, two clearings, tawny against the emerald foliage, swim into view. Communal thatched huts—malocas—line up in one clearing, while the other appears to be a farm field. Fagan has spotted the settlement of an isolated tribe, far from any known villages—an extremely rare sighting.

After flying over unbroken jungle and rivers for another hour, the plane bumps to a halt in Puerto Esperanza, the capital of Peru’s remote Purús province, which is wedged up against the Brazilian border. A straggling town of fewer than 2000 people unconnected by roads and served only by occasional flights, it is the gateway to the Purús Communal Reserve and the Alto Purús National Park, which border other protected areas. Together, these lands form a Virginia-sized region of tropical rainforest that is home to isolated people as well as threatened and endangered species like pink-hued dolphins, harpy eagles, and black caimans.

Aboard the plane is a team organized by UAC and ProPurús to investigate the recent raids and gauge the villagers’ preparedness for future encounters. The nine-person team includes interpreters for native languages and Rafael Pino Solano, chief of the Purús Communal Reserve. Along with gear and food, the group crams into a motorized canoe christened Lobo del Rio—river wolf—after a giant endangered Amazonian otter. The Curanja River lies a day’s journey from Puerto Esperanza, up the milk chocolate–colored Purús River amid swarms of biting gnats, frequent rain showers, and calls of birds and monkeys in the thick rainforest lining the banks. Distance here is measured not by kilometers but by turns of the wide river.

At Curanjillo, a hamlet of seven families upstream from where the Curanja joins the Purús, villagers worry that isolated people will continue to make off with pans and hammocks. “We know [the tribes] are around, although no one sees them,” explains village chief José Torres Nacimiento, sitting in the open-air community building as women paint traditional designs on visitors’ arms with natural plant dyes. “Things are taken, there are footprints, and you hear animal sounds.” Nacimiento adds that “people feel angry and abandoned” by a government that seems more concerned with the fate of the isolated peoples than with the welfare of villagers who lack electricity, clean water, and health care.

The villagers along the Curanja are themselves only a generation or two removed from a traditional life in the forest. Christian missionaries encouraged them to settle down starting in the 1950s. Now, they keep chickens and grow peanuts, mango, and cocoa beans while maintaining some traditional practices.

A dozen turns upriver in the village of Nueva Vida, a robust 78-year-old elder named Filomeno Torres Marquez recalls that when he was a child, “we were naked, without clothes, or chickens or salt or sugar.” Today, he is just back from a solo hunt for the piglike peccary and a large bird called a curassow—traditional forest staples. In an impromptu demonstration, Marquez pulls out his bow and arrow, both taller than his small but sturdy frame, and demonstrates his mastery by piercing an old shoe several dozen meters away.

Stories of fleeting contact and “harvests” by isolated peoples are echoed in village after village as the group approaches the communal wilderness. Thirteen more turns upriver in Columbiana, a 42-year-old farmer named Maquias Pinero Puricho reports that the isolated peoples appear hungry. “I think these guys don’t have a food safety net, such as farms, so they seek out ours,” he says. Solano notes that in the communal reserve itself, recent floods limited the supply of turtle eggs, a key food for forest peoples in the summer. And the larger of the two main types of peccaries, which usually travel in packs of 100 or more, is in steep decline for unknown reasons. Last year, Mashco Piro tribespeople appeared on the riverbank near the town of Monte Salvado, demanding, “Where did the peccaries go?”

The next village upstream, Balta, boasts a medical post with a nurse, Miguel Silva. But Silva lacks transportation and basic medical supplies, such as antivenom. “Ask the Ministry of Health why I have no boat or motor,” he says. The previous day, a common viper bit the village chief’s 9-year-old son. The chief chose to treat the boy with traditional plant medicines rather than send him a day’s journey downstream to Puerto Esperanza. But when the team offers antivenom, the father relents. The boy ultimately recovers.

Silva also lacks the tools to protect emerging tribes from their biggest danger: infections that can lurk in something as innocent as a cast-off T-shirt. “Most authorities don’t take this problem seriously,” Huertas says. “A cold for us is an inconvenience; for them it can be a tragedy,” she says. Influenza can abruptly wipe out whole tribes. In the 1980s, half of one isolated tribe—some 300 to 400 people—perished after workers for the Dutch oil company Shell passed on pathogens, she says.

A HALF-DAY’S CANOE RIDE upstream in Santa Rey, the last village before the wilder-ness, Abilio Roque came back from voting in October to find his entire house burned to the ground, including the hunting and fishing gear he uses to survive. The culprit was Epa, a man from an isolated tribe who was enticed out of the forest a dozen years ago by missionaries. Roque had allowed Epa to stay in his house during the elections, and the tribesman later admitted that he had burned it down by accident, according to Roque’s grandson. Known along the Curanja as a man who inhabits a netherworld between isolated and settled people, Epa embodies the tensions brought by this new wave of contact, and some villagers have grown to distrust him.

The expedition pushes off from Santa Rey and sets off into Epa’s territory, just inside the communal reserve. Accompanied now by a small flotilla of forest rangers and local villagers, the Lobo del Rio ties up along the north side of the riverbank, near where Epa is known to live with his two wives and a mother-in-law. An older woman appears. “Help! My leg hurts—give me a shot,” she wails in the Mastanahua language, falling to the ground in distress. She explains that her name is Maria and that Epa, her son-in-law, has gone to visit his family in the forest. Visitors follow her limping figure about a hundred meters to a makeshift compound hidden in the jungle. Two dozen dogs bark wildly within a palm-fronded shelter strung with small hammocks, one per dog. Dozens of empty turtle shells litter the slope below.

Although Maria’s leg appears slightly swollen, the interpreter says that her distress centers on the recent death of a pet dog and monkey. Her daughter Elena, one of Epa’s wives, ignores the visitors while cradling a sick dog and singing a haunting song. Curious foresters and villagers crowd around, snapping photos with their iPhones. As Maria’s anxiety increases, Fagan calls everyone to withdraw to the boats, to avoid exacerbating a situation that verges on chaos. After camping on a wide beach, the next morning the team heads back downriver. A figure appears on the far bank: Epa himself. He wears a knit cap and a blue and yellow striped shirt and has a small circle of metal cut from a tin can suspended from his nostrils. His eyebrows are shaved, and he looks past middle age. He invites some of the visitors to his compound.

Epa—the name means “father” in the Pano language family—says that his real name is Shuri and that although he has no children, he has 10 family members in the forest. “I often visit my family in the forest, and they often come to visit me here,” he says through an interpreter. His people do not farm or build canoes, he says. He boasts that he recently shot a tapir, a large snouted mammal, taking half to his family, and he proudly shows off his bow and arrow, skillfully made of local wood and fiber.

When asked about the maloca that Fagan saw from the air, he nods. “Those are our enemies,” he says, adding that he fled here in part to avoid their violence. Such clashes among tribes are common and may intensify as the jungle shrinks, anthropologists say.

Epa says his family is reluctant to join him because game and fruit are scarce nearby. “We need cooking oil, sugar, salt, knives, machetes, tobacco, and clothes. If you give me plenty of these things—all the things you use in town—then my relatives might move here. … Maybe if there were a large house and a farm to support us, then they might come and settle down.”

He offers to exchange a large turtle and two small ones for staples and flashlights. Fagan trades the animals, which are later released in the river, for rice, sugar, and oil. “I know you won’t give me the flashlights,” Epa grouses, his eyes straying to the photographer’s camera gear.

At the mention of the October raids, Epa grows wary. “Yes, some of my family members were involved,” he admits. “But the timing was just coincidence. I didn’t know everyone would be gone.” But the Curanja villagers say that Epa knew all about the elections. They suspect that he is much more than a naive native seeking safety, sugar, and salt. He is, they believe, studying them as carefully as any anthropologist, noting the ripening of orchard fruits, the quantity of their goods, and their daily movements. He may be, in effect, a spy.

“I’ve been analyzing the encounters with isolated people since Epa’s arrival around 2002,” says Tomas Torres Alicio, a 61-year-old schoolteacher back downstream in Columbiana. “There have been 15 or so incidents, almost all on the north bank of the Curanja. … He must be telling his family details about our farms and goods, and when we are absent.”  Whatever Epa’s precise role in the incidents, he is an agent of contact, and Fagan worries that he may transmit pathogens back to his people in the jungle.

Some villagers and even government foresters lack the dozen or so vaccinations recommended to protect isolated peoples, says reserve chief Solano. Missionaries say that Epa, Maria, and his wives refused vaccinations a decade ago; whether they have been vaccinated since is not clear. “He and his family have consistent contact with their tribe, which still lives in isolation and have not received any immunizations, as well as with nearby villagers who travel to cities, and even with the occasional outsiders who visit the Curanja,” Fagan says. “Disease transmission is a significant and immediate threat.”

Epa’s story shows the need for better planning and health care in these remote regions, Huertas says. “You can’t take them to a town,” she says of the tribespeople. “You need a small group of specialists to isolate them from villages.” This would entail building small centers on the reserve perimeters, as is done in Brazil, to serve as a base for treating or helping isolated people.

Back at the Ministry of Culture in Lima, Prieto acknowledges the need. “We respect the right of the people to be isolated, and we are also pushing to provide health care assistance.” But with an annual budget of only $1 million, her 17-member staff is stretched thin. “There is no way to cover this amount of territory on our budget,” she says. The government has yet to agree on health protocols for the isolated peoples, much less on the funding to put Prieto’s vision into place. Meanwhile, anthropologists agree that more research is desperately needed to understand just why tribes are emerging now.

If isolated people do manage to avoid epidemics, the loss of land, and violence by hostile outsiders, they may find little comfort in the struggling villages along the Curanja. These villagers themselves have yet to reap many of the benefits of modern civilization, including electricity, clean water, or employment opportunities. “After initial contact, these people are often left to their fate, struggling to survive, cut off from other groups, begging for food, and with no land to call their own,” Huertas says. Faced with a shrinking habitat and an influx of outsiders, however, the tribes’ time for choosing between the forest and settled life may be drawing to a close as abruptly as the tropical dusk. ■

The post Making Contact appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

The Islamic State group strikes one valuable archaeological site after another, destroying priceless ruins and artifacts.

The ancient city of Hatra fended off two Roman emperors and repulsed a ruler of Persia’s powerful Sassanid dynasty. But late last week, local people near the ornate ruins about 110 kilometers southwest of the Iraqi city of Mosul heard massive explosions that likely marked the demise of the 2000-year-old city and its spectacular, well-preserved sculptures and stone architecture.

While inflicting misery on the people of northern Iraq, supporters of the Islamic State group have also attacked one ancient site after another in the past 2 weeks, systematically taking sledgehammers and drills to artifacts. Other reports say that the forces of the group, increasingly known by its Arabic acronym Daesh, are using bulldozers to demolish ancient buildings. By last week the toll included the statues in the Mosul Museum, the classical site of Hatra, and the ancient Assyrian capitals of Nineveh, Nimrud, and Khorsabad, famed for their massive protective deities in the form of humanheaded winged bulls. Assur, a 4500-year-old temple-studded Assyrian city where kings and queens were laid to rest for centuries, is likely the next target, say archaeologists, who are desperately trying to piece together the extent of the damage.

The unprecedented wave of destruction has prompted a small protest march in Washington, D.C., as well as statements of outrage from archaeologists and museum curators around the world. U.N. officials have said that the events constituted a war crime. “Those barbaric, criminal terrorists are trying to destroy the heritage of mankind and Iraq’s civilization,” said Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. He spoke during a ceremony on 28 February in which his government reopened Baghdad’s long-shuttered Iraq Museum as a way of reaffirming the importance of the country’s heritage.

Outside experts feel the losses keenly, because northern Iraqi sites have been largely off-limits to study since the start of the first Gulf War a quarter-century ago. “Assyria was the first true empire in world history,” says Yale University Assyriologist Eckart Frahm. Its “scholarly exploration is far from complete.” For example, many of the inscriptions at Nimrud have yet to be properly documented, he says.

Representatives and publications from the Islamic State group have said that statues and reliefs of animals and humans are anathema to their brand of Sunni Islam. “We were ordered by our prophet to take down idols and destroy them,” explained an unidentified Daesh representative in a video widely distributed earlier this month, which showed men pushing intricately carved statues off their plinths and smashing the remains with sledgehammers. Another video image showed a man using an electric drill to destroy the human face of a huge winged bull standing at a gate at Nineveh.

Independent Iraqi archaeologist Lamia al-Gailani, based in London, identified the location of the destroyed statues as the Mosul Museum and said that 26 of the 30 statues in the museum’s Hatra hall were originals, made during Hatra’s heyday at the start of the common era. She adds that 21 of 24 Assyrian reliefs and statues from Nineveh and Nimrud in the museum were also originals.

The militants spare some artifacts because sales serve as an important source of revenue, according to organizations tracking the illicit antiquities trade. Irina Bokova, the head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said that officials are examining images that showed looted material from Nimrud, about 30 kilo meters southeast of Mosul, “put on big trucks” and transported, possibly for sale.

After looting Nimrud, the capital of the sprawling Assyrian Empire in the 8th century B.C.E., Islamic State forces reduced some or all of it to rubble. Abdul Amir Hamdani, an Iraqi archaeologist at Stony Brook University in New York, spoke with a colleague in Mosul familiar with the situation and reports that Islamic State forces occupied Nimrud for several days before bulldozing it from noon to late evening on 5 March.

The next day, explosions were heard at Hatra, though the extent of damage at the statue-filled site remains uncertain. Then on 8 March, the Iraqi government said that Islamic State supporters demolished Khorsabad, another ancient Assyrian capital about 15 kilometers northeast of Mosul. Hamdani and other archeologists fear that Assur, nearly 100 kilometers south of Mosul, is next, although that site lacks the large sculptures that have previously drawn Daesh’s attention.

In an 8 March press conference in Baghdad, Adel Fahad al-Shershab, Iraq’s minister of tourism and antiquities, lamented the lack of international action. “We request aerial support” from the United States, he said. American bombers carried out a dozen airstrikes in the region this past weekend, but it was not clear if protecting the sites was part of the mission. American bombers are striking Islamic State forces involved in the destruction and looting, including machinery like bulldozers and earth excavators, said U.S. Defense Department spokesperson Kim Michelsen. “But we don’t have troops on the ground to protect the sites—and that might make them even more of a target,” he said.

U.S. spy satellites, however, could provide important data on the exact extent of damage. The U.S. State Department made a “high-priority request for new satellite imagery,” according to a source there. Realtime imaging could conceivably be used to follow the trucks that left Nimrud, and so track looted material. But such requests will likely take a back seat to ongoing military operations, including a battle now unfolding around Tikrit. Meanwhile, Sunni Islam’s leading institution, al-Azhar in Cairo, put out a statement declaring that the destruction “is forbidden in Islam and rejected in total … [and is] a major crime against the whole world.”

For Near Eastern archaeologists, the news provoked both outrage and a sense of helplessness. Many say they are at a loss about what they could do to reverse—or even assess—the damage. The University of Chicago, long a center of research in the field, said in a statement that the events add “to the growing spiral of despair from both Iraq and Syria.” Hamdani expressed his anger by helping organize a small 10 March protest near the White House. “Thousands of years of history are being smashed by the hammers of ignorance,” he says. “With each destroyed statue, a story is forgotten.”

The post Militants leave trail of destruction at Iraqi sites appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

Indo-Pacific beads offer clues to ancient trading patterns. PHOTO: SHINU ANNA ABRAHAM AND P. J. CHERIAN/KCHR

In a small laboratory tucked into the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, Laure Dussubieux carefully positions a tiny bead so that a laser can drill a microscopic pit into its surface, releasing a puff of gas. A mass spectrometer then reads the gas’s composition, including the trace elements. The result is a unique signature that often can reveal how, where, and even when the glass was formed, Dussubieux explains. And that has turned humble glass beads into tools for tracing long-lost trade routes in the Indian Ocean (see main story). “I think it’s pretty great that you can take a simple glass bead, shoot a laser at it, crunch some numbers, and then get the recipe used to make the glass,” says Alison Carter, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and one of many researchers who show up regularly at Dussubieux’s door with their own colorful bits of glass. Around the vast Indian Ocean, peoples spoke different languages, ate different foods, and worshiped different gods. But they shared a love of glass beads, which typically were strung together to make colorful bracelets and necklaces. Enormous effort and skill went into making huge numbers of baubles as small as 3 millimeters in diameter in a dazzling array of colors. Difficult to date and organize into types, the artifacts were long neglected by archaeologists. Then, in the 1990s, archaeologist Bernard Gratuze of the French national research agency CNRS in Orléans began to pioneer bead analysis using lasers and a mass spectrometer; Dussubieux learned the technique as a Ph.D. student in his lab. Beads were often made locally of raw glass ingots that had been shipped great distances, and the new technique made it possible to trace the glass to its origin, revealing shipping and trade routes. For example, bead studies have shown that a glass formula using mineral soda appears to have originated around the 5th century B.C.E. in the Ganges plain of northern India and then spread south and east. When Dussubiex analyzed about 200 beads excavated at Khao Sam Kaeo, which emerged as a trading city on the Malay Peninsula beginning in the 4th century B.C.E., she found that many were made of this soda-rich glass. Thus, the raw glass was likely made in India and shipped more than 2000 kilometers east. In a study of Cambodian beads, Carter discovered that 1st century C.E. beads from the southeast of the country were made using potash—an indigenous Cambodian method—whereas beads in the northwest consisted of mineral soda glass from India. In later centuries, however, soda glass spread to southeastern Cambodia, perhaps a sign of rising Indian influence. Across the Indian Ocean, Marilee Wood of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, is using bead analysis to track trade routes along the southern coast of East Africa. Changing bead types reveal African ties to the Middle East starting around the 7th century C.E., followed by trade with distant Sumatra and then with India around 1000 C.E. “We have early glass coming from Southeast Asia,” she says. “This is a very different pattern than you find in the north” coast, where Middle Eastern and Indian glass predominates. Carter, like many of her colleagues, praises Dussubieux for her analyses and patient work training others to read beads. She’s “a walking database of glass types,” Carter says. “Combined with the body of work from Laure and others, the glass bead can be tied into a whole network of ancient glass production and trade.

The post Drawing a bead on trade appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

“One day, the old desire entered my head to visit far countries and strange people, to voyage among the isles and curiously regard things hitherto unknown to me,” recalls Sinbad the Sailor in The Thousand and One Nights, first compiled in the 9th century C.E. “Also, the trading habit rose in me again.” This wily Odysseus of the Indian Ocean told fantastic stories of shipwrecks, cannibals, and exotic lands rich with gems and heady spices.

Until recently, Sinbad’s tall tales held little interest for scholars of ancient and medieval East-West relations. They focused instead on the more than 6000-kilometer Silk Road far to the north, made famous by Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who traveled across the Central Asian steppes from Europe to China in the 13th century. Most researchers ignored the fact that Polo returned to Europe via the Indian Ocean, in the waters plied by real-world Sinbads. Glimpsed only in the odd Roman coin found in an Indian village or in medieval Chinese ceramics washed up on a Kenyan shore, the southern maritime road was easy to overlook.

Now, this busy trading route is emerging from the shadows. Researchers are picking through Southeast Asian swamps, diving off Sri Lankan reefs, and digging on African beaches. The artifacts they are finding—glass beads, potsherds, seeds, animal bones—reveal a lost story of Indian Ocean trade that went far beyond the simple exchange of gems and spices. “Finally we are moving beyond just talking about trade to the making of cultural identity,” says archaeologist and historian Himanshu Prabha Ray of New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The work, still in the early stages, is shifting archaeologists’ focus from the great empires at either end of the Silk Road—Rome and China—to the trade and influence of the vibrant societies in between. Until recently, many historians would have agreed with a 20th century French scholar who dismissed the world’s third largest ocean as “scarcely more than an extension of the eastern Mediterranean.” A paucity of ancient texts and archaeological digs reinforced this parochial view.

But the new evidence shows that from 2000 B.C.E. until the arrival of Europeans in 1498, the Indian Ocean network linked diverse societies on three continents, catalyzing industrial development and cultural changes from early Southeast Asia to medieval coastal Africa. It all sounds unexpectedly modern, says J. D. Hill, an archaeologist at the British Museum in London. “The surprise is that the world was interconnected long ago.”

In 2008, archaeologist Nicole Boivin of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and colleagues won a $1.5 million, 5-year grant from the European Research Council to piece together the neglected history of Indian Ocean trade. They have since been expanding collaborations, applying new methods to existing artifacts, and conducting small digs around the rim of the ocean. Their ambitious goal is to track how plants, animals, trade goods, people, and ideas moved across the ocean over more than 3 millennia, and they shared progress reports at a November 2013 meeting in Oxford on protoglobalization in the region. Says archaeologist Greger Larson of Britain’s Durham University, with a touch of Sinbad swagger: “We are a new generation of explorers.”

Artisans Arrive: East Indian Ocean, 5th century B.C.E. to 2nd century B.C.E.

Tracing trade. At Khao Sam Kaeo, archaeologists discovered traces of an ancient city; 2000 kilometers away off Sri Lanka (right), divers examining a wreck found a pot from around 150 B.C.E.
PHOTOS: (LEFT TO RIGHT) BÉRÉNICE BELLINA-PRYCE; SUSANNAH H. SNOWDEN

The Indian Ocean is defined by the monsoon, an Arabic word for season. Blowing southwest from May to September and northeast from November to March, this wind reliably propels ships across large stretches of open sea. As early as 2000 B.C.E., Indian merchants traveled to Arabia on these winds, according to finds made in the 1980s (Science, 28 May 2010, p. 1101). Such ancient trade shaped the distribution of domesticated plants and animals: Grains like sorghum and millet made their way from Africa to India; zebu cattle went from India to Africa; and cinnamon and nutmeg moved from South Asia all the way to Israel and Egypt—although it is unclear who carried this bounty from continent to continent, and how. Now, a second phase of international trade, in the early centuries B.C.E., is coming to light in the eastern half of the ocean. In this period, India and China were urbanizing but Southeast Asia was long considered a rural backwater until its first empires arose, such as the Khmer empire based at Angkor Wat. Now, archaeologists are discovering that by 400 B.C.E., Southeast Asians were making iron, supporting an elite, and building large moated settlements of their own design, says Charles Higham of the University of Otago, Dunedin, in New Zealand, who has excavated extensively in Thailand and Cambodia. This new Southeast Asian elite would have prized luxury goods—and new finds suggest that trade with distant north India helped provide them. Between 2005 and 2009, a French-Thai expedition uncovered what may be the oldest known city in Southeast Asia, at the narrowest point of the Malay Peninsula that separates the Indian Ocean from the South China Sea. The site of Khao Sam Kaeo was an early and important trading link between India and Southeast Asia, argues Bérénice Bellina-Pryce, an archaeologist from the French national research agency CNRS in Paris who led the dig. Located 500 kilometers south of Bangkok, Khao Sam Kaeo is now a remote swamp. But millennia ago, it was a convenient point to unload goods from the Indian Ocean for overland transport to Southeast Asia (see map), avoiding a longer voyage through the treacherous, pirate-plagued Strait of Malacca to the south. The dig revealed that from the 4th century B.C.E. to the 1st century B.C.E., Khao Sam Kaeo was a sprawling city of walled neighborhoods surrounded by a ditch-and-palisade rampart. The finding was so unexpected that “it took me years to convince colleagues that we had an early form of urbanization,” Bellina-Pryce says. Later cosmopolitan coastal towns in this region probably resembled Khao Sam Kaeo. Working in dense forest and beset by looters, the team found metal vessels and stone and glass beads linking the site to India to the west and to Vietnam and China to the east. Bronze and iron workers at the site used copper alloys similar to those in Vietnam and China. But the beads, although made locally, were crafted using Indian technologies and imported glass (see sidebar), evidently by Indian artisans fashioning goods for Southeast Asian elites.

Higham, who was not involved in the research, concludes “the work at Khao Sam Kaeo has revealed beyond reasonable doubt that Indian craft workers were settling coastal port towns in the [Malay] peninsula by the 4th century B.C.E., and fashioning beads there for local tastes.” Indian cotton weavers were also likely hawking their wares in Southeast Asia in the early centuries B.C.E. The cotton has long since disintegrated, but the artisans left behind iron biconical spindle whorls, distinctive little objects with a hole in the middle and tapered on two sides. These whorls show up first in India as early as 400 B.C.E. and spread as far east as Vietnam in the following centuries, says Judith Cameron of the Australian National University in Canberra. There’s no reason to transport a spindle whorl unless you’re creating a textile yourself, she notes. “These are hard to use without knowledge and have no intrinsic value,” she says. The whorls and beads shed light on a heretofore unknown migration of artisans and merchants. They suggest that in the early centuries B.C.E., Indian people as well as goods landed in Southeast Asia, where they met a complex society with a wealthy elite. “This is not about the materials, but about the links formed by people,” says archaeologist James Lankton of University College London, who has worked at Khao Sam Kaeo.

Buddhist Steel: Indian subcontinent, 3rd century B.C.E. to 4th century C.E.

While Khao Sam Kaeo flourished in the east, a new era of trade began in the western half of the Indian Ocean. A unique Greek text offers a glimpse of it. Copied in the 10th century C.E. by a Byzantine scribe, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea is based on a document likely written in the 1st century C.E. by a ship captain or merchant. In 66 short chapters, it describes the geographical, economic, and political landscape from East Africa to Malaysia. The manuscript describes cinnamon and slaves for sale in Somalia, mentions the best ports to buy Indian cotton and sesame oil, and cites the Ganges valley as a source of silks, ivory, and precious stones. Contemporary Roman writers add another detail: Hundreds of ships annually sailed the monsoon from Egypt to India carrying grain, silver, and other goods, and returned with Chinese silk and Asian spices, such as cinnamon and nutmeg. Using these texts as guides, historians long assumed that Rome’s appetite for luxury goods drove trade in this period. Roman coins and amphorae found from India to Vietnam reinforced this belief, which was “the culmination of Indian Ocean history as Roman history,” as archaeologist Eivind Heldaas Seland of the University of Bergen in Norway wrote in a review earlier this year. Recent excavations at the Egyptian Red Sea port of Berenike have confirmed some of the goods mentioned in the Periplus: spices, wood, textiles, bamboo, and coconuts imported from the east as early as the 3rd century B.C.E. But archaeological work now under way in Sri Lanka, the teardrop-shaped island off the southern coast of India, contradicts the idea that Westerners jumpstarted the Indian Ocean economy. Instead, Egyptian and Roman merchants were likely drawn to an already booming international trade, researchers say. Clues come from the oldest known shipwreck in the Indian Ocean. A team of Sri Lankan and American researchers recently completed their second full season of work on the wreck, which lies 34 meters underwater just offshore from the estuary of Walawe River, one of the island’s few navigable rivers. The boat itself appears to have disintegrated, but may have been 25 meters or more in length. Recovered material has been dated by artifacts and radiocarbon to between 200 and 100 B.C.E., says archaeologist Deborah Carlson of Texas A&M University, College Station, who is co-leading the effort with Osmund Bopearachchi from Paris’s CNRS (Science, 20 July 2012, p. 288). Among the artifacts are several glass ingots, likely made in India and on their way to be used in local production of beads and bangles. Divers also spotted remnants of cargo: Several solid masses of iron and rock, about 3 meters high and totaling about 20 meters long. Carlson thinks she knows where the iron came from: hilly areas upriver, where other archaeologists are finding ancient mines and iron and steel production facilities dating to the centuries before and after the start of the common era. (Iron production began by 1500 B.C.E. on the nearby Indian subcontinent, centuries before it caught on in the Middle East and Europe.) Researchers have identified a giant slag heap—as big as four school buses parked end to end—along the Walawe River in Sri Lanka’s interior and dated it to 400 to 200 B.C.E., reported Mats Mogren of the Swedish National Heritage Board in Lund at the Oxford meeting. This single site could have produced thousands of tons of finished iron as well as high-carbon steel, smelted in 2-meter-high furnaces fired by ranks of monsoon-powered windmills. “The technological knowledge is very high,” says Mogren, who estimates that hundreds of such sites may exist. “This has fantastic implications” for long-distance trade in metals, he adds. The Sri Lankan wreck confirms that metals were made for export, not just smallscale domestic consumption. Thus, an island once considered a rural society was also an industrial powerhouse. “Hinduwane,” the Arab term for steel in the 6th and 7th centuries C.E., may reflect that role, Mogren notes: “Wane” is the word for steel in Sri Lanka’s native tongue, Sinhalese.

The Birth of Swahili: East African coast, 800 C.E. to 1400 C.E.

In the early centuries of Indian Ocean trade, “East Africa is the missing story,” says Mark Horton, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. Few ancient texts clarify Africa’s role, and archaeology there lags behind work on Asian coasts. The Periplus mentions extensive trade between Mediterranean and African ports. But excavators have yet to identify any ports predating 700 C.E., and “Greco-Roman” beads found on the African coast turned out to be medieval, according to analyses by archaeologist Marilee Wood of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Evidence is growing that East Africa south of Somalia did not play a major role in Indian Ocean trade until after that time.

Spice route. Even today, cinnamon is processed on Sri Lanka.
PHOTO: © ANURUDDHA LOKUHAPUARACHCHI/REUTERS

The Indian Ocean trade did eventually leave one of its most enduring legacies on the African coast from Kenya to Mozambique: an entire culture based on the trading way of life. The Swahili way of life includes the Muslim faith, an Arabic-laced language, and culinary and mercantile traditions strongly reminiscent of the Middle East. The word “Swahili” itself is Arabic for “coastal dwellers.”

Medieval texts describe ivory, gold, timber, and slave exports from Africa to the Middle East. Many historians therefore theorized that the Swahili culture was born when Persians and Arabs came to the East African coast in the 8th and 9th centuries to extract resources. But preliminary results of an unpublished genetic study in coastal Kenya suggest that the number of foreigners was few and that the Swahili are overwhelmingly of African lineage. Ryan Raaum, a biologist at Lehman College in New York City, sampled 150 men in 13 coastal communities and examined their maternal—X—and paternal—Y—chromosomes, as well as some preliminary genome-wide DNA. Just over half the paternal genes resembled those found among Arabs, Iranians, and South Indians, suggesting foreign fathers. By contrast, few of the maternal genes appeared foreign, and the genome-wide data are also chiefly African. Raaum suggests that a relatively small number of foreign men successfully introduced their genes into a mostly African population. He is now sequencing entire genomes to clarify this picture.

Research on plant and animal introductions supports the view that East Africa entered the Indian Ocean trade around 800 C.E. Archaeobotanical finds show that the cultivation of previously unknown grains like rice began in the region by 800 C.E., with the arrival of two separate strains, one from Southeast Asia and one from India, according to genetic studies by Erik Gilbert of Arkansas State University, Jonesboro. Cats, chickens, and rats also appear to have arrived in East Africa by ship starting in the 8th century. The use of foods like rice did not spread inland until much later, a sign that Swahili culture was oriented toward the Indian Ocean rather than interior Africa.

SINBAD’S SHIP

What kind of vessels made these voyages? Based on the few wrecks found to date, Lucy Blue, a maritime archaeologist at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, says that a typical vessel of Sinbad’s era carried 1000 times the weight a camel can bear and required far less human labor than a Silk Road caravan. One example, a 9th century ship wrecked off the coast of Indonesia in the Java Sea, epitomized the protoglobalization of the medieval Indian Ocean. The vessel was crafted in an Arab style, carried a load of Chinese goods, and was built with timbers from Africa, according to Horton. Another wreck turned up just last fall on a shrimp farm on the southwest outskirts of Bangkok. A team co-led by Erbprem Vatcharangkul, chief of Thailand’s underwater archaeological division, began excavating and revealed a vessel at least 35 meters in length, built in Arab style and dating to about the 8th century. Sailors or looters have scavenged the cargo, but they left behind an ivory tusk, wood that likely comes from India, and Chinese ceramics.

In ancient times, spices like Indonesian nutmeg drew merchants across the Indian Ocean.
PHOTO: © YUSUF AHMAD/REUTERS

The sailing culture that these ships spawned left its mark on the societies that ring the ocean. Southern Indian Tamil poetry from the first 3 centuries C.E. warns young men not to leave home for dreams of wealth in distant ports, notes archaeologist Veerasamy Selvakumar of Tamil University in Thanjavur. That’s a sign of societal stress as people shifted from traditional farming and fishing to mercantile pursuits, he says. Later inscriptions and stone carvings suggest that ship owners grew into an influential and wealthy class, according to archaeologist Pierre-Yves Manguin of the National University of Singapore. A Javanese shipmaster, for example, served as ambassador from a Javanese kingdom to the Chinese court in 993 C.E. “They played a big role as cultural diplomats and in propagating” faiths like Buddhism and Islam, Manguin says.

The tales of Sinbad reflect this status. In his final voyage, the Iraqi-born merchant acts as a diplomat for the Baghdad caliph, carrying precious gifts to a distant ruler and earning the caliph’s gratitude.

By 1400 C.E., the geopolitical dynamics in the Indian Ocean began to change as Chinese and European consumers tired of buying expensive foreign goods through Arab, Indian, and Southeast Asian middlemen. Fleets of massive Chinese ships, some carrying 500 people, cruised as far west as Arabia and Africa, rattling the locals (Science, 9 May, p. 572).

Less than a century later, Europeans followed suit, mastering the trip around Africa. Over the succeeding centuries, the Indian Ocean trade fractured into more local exchange as the Portuguese, French, Dutch, and British, equipped with better military technology than the regional powers, carved up the waters well into the 20th century. Today, however, the ocean is humming with international trade again; two-thirds of the world’s trade goods move through it.

Sinbad retired comfortably to Baghdad after his seventh voyage, pledging never to set foot on a ship again. Archaeologists, however, are only at the beginning of their effort to recover the long-lost chronicle of the Indian Ocean. “We are rewriting history,” Wood says.

Science 27 June 2014:
Vol. 344 no. 6191 pp. 1440-1445
DOI: 10.1126/science.344.6191.1440

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In 2001, archaeologist Michael Petraglia was picking through boxes in a museum storeroom in Riyadh, the dusty capital of Saudi Arabia. Petraglia, who had been coaxed by Saudi colleagues to examine the country’s prehistory on a Fulbright scholarship, was stunned to find huge numbers of stone tools crafted by ancient hunter-gatherers and apparently tens or even hundreds of thousands of years old.

Michael Petraglia in his element, near the oasis of Tayma in Saudi Arabia.
PHOTO: RICHARD JENNINGS/UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD (2)

Like most researchers interested in human origins, Petraglia had dismissed the Arabian Peninsula as a place of marginal interest. Conventional wisdom held that humans settled this inhospitable environment only a few thousand years ago, when domesticated animals like goats and camels made it habitable. “Arabia was thought of as empty,” he says.

Intrigued by the tools, he set out to explore the harsh landscape. Walking the sand dunes, the lanky American-born scientist spotted the outlines of long, dry lakes—and littering their vanished shores, he saw innumerable gray and brown triangular pieces of rock expertly knapped by human hands. Today, these deserts are home only to hardy Bedouin nomads and the occasional crew drilling for oil. In the distant past, however, large numbers of our ancestors apparently found this land a congenial home. “I was blown away,” recalls Petraglia, now a professor at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. “There were artifacts everywhere—it was astounding.”

The finds had particular relevance for him. Many researchers contend that modern humans did not expand beyond their African homeland until 55,000 years or so ago, moving quickly eastward around the Indian Ocean to reach Australia within 10,000 years. But even before he spotted those artifacts in the desert, Petraglia had suspected that humans left their home continent tens of thousands of years earlier and wandered slowly eastward, deep into Asia. An ancientArabia that welcomed modern humans with lakes and greenery fitted neatly into these ideas: “I understood immediately that it was a steppingstone toward South Asia,” he says.

Busy with excavations in India, where he found stone tools amid 74,000-year-old volcanic ash—evidence, he says, that our ancestors reached India by that date—Petraglia waited a decade before he returned to Saudi Arabia. His black hair now shading to gray, he is no longer a lone researcher on a brief scholarship. Armed with a $3.3 million grant from the European Research Council (ERC) and backed by a Saudi prince, Petraglia oversees an effort involving a dozen institutions and some 50 researchers from around the world who are fanning out across the kingdom to uncover Arabia’s role in human dispersal out of Africa.

“Climate is at the heart of this,” says Petraglia, who organized a meeting in Oxford in April to discuss new Arabian finds. The human artifacts, though abundant, are mostly undated and difficult to link to specific cultures. But his group and others canvassing neighboring Oman and the United Arab Emirates have amassed evidence that during the crucial time when human ancestors may have left Africa, the Arabian Peninsula was, at least at intervals, temptingly wet andgreen.

Petraglia’s group is using satellite data to map ancient lakes and river systems, then traversing the vast region to confirm their findings on the ground. All told, they have pinpointed more than a thousand ancient lakes that were filled with water off and on during the past few hundred thousand years, along with hundreds of artifact-filled sites. In the past 3 years, his team and others dated a handful of these sites, the earliest of them to 125,000 and 211,000 years ago. What’s still missing are bones of the people who left the artifacts, which could reveal who the peninsula’s ancient inhabitants were—modern humans or extinct human relatives.

Already, though, Petraglia is convinced that rather than skirting Arabia, modern humans on their way from Africa into the wider world may have colonized it, hopping from lake to lake across the peninsula in pursuit of game and useful plants—a slow, meandering dispersal rather than the rapid march commonly envisioned. In time, he is likely to have the bones that could confirm this scenario—or contradict it.

“With all the activity in Arabia these days, Petraglia’s team is going to find a human fossil eventually,” says archaeologist John Shea of Stony Brook University in New York. “It is just a matter of time.”

ACCORDING TO A SAYING of the Prophet Muhammad, Judgment Day will not come “until the land of the Arabs returns to its state of lush pasture and abundant rivers.” The notion that the sand dunes and bare mountains of Arabia were once verdant has long demanded a leap of faith. The region includes the Rub al Khali, Arabic for “the Empty Quarter,” the planet’s largest sand desert, a Texas-sized wilderness where temperatures soar above 50°C and rain averages fewer than 30 millimeters annually.

Yet even today, Arabia’s landscape is not entirely dry or sandy. In the extreme southern province of Dhofar in Oman, for example, more than 200 millimeters of rain green the hills most summers, when the annual Indian Ocean monsoon grazes the Omani coast. And climate models suggest that during the intervals between ice ages, this greening spreads across the peninsula. According to the models, the monsoon system then slips northward, drenching what is now desert for a few thousand years or more before resuming its more typical southerly course.

The most pronounced period of wet and warm weather in the past few hundred thousand years took place about 125,000 years ago, during the height of the last interglacial. Less dramatic monsoon shifts came about 80,000 and 55,000 years ago. “When the water pump is on, brown Arabia turns green,” explains geoarchaeologist Adrian Parker of Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, who’s involved in the project.

Other geologic clues, such as paleolakes, mineral deposits in caves, and alluvial fans, support the paleoclimate models, pointing to moist periods of varying length, says Richard Jennings, a University of Oxford archaeologist and climate expert who recently spent 4 months gathering field data. During the wet spells, lakes filled up, rivers ran, and a savannalike environment resembling that of today’s East Africa dominated Arabia. “There could be tens of thousands of former lakes and wetlands” in Arabia during the wet periods, says Paul Breeze of King’s College London, a hydrologist who has already identified 1300 paleolake and wetland sites in just 10% of the peninsula.

Members of a Petraglia expedition recently explored one dry lakebed near the town of Jubbah, about 350 kilometers north of Riyadh in the Kentucky-sized Nefud Desert that lies between Jordan and central Arabia. “Jubbah was a huge lake, thick with reeds and full of mollusk beds,” during wet periods, says University of Oxford archaeologist Ash Parton. Given the botanical and faunal remains, the lake “may have been a long-term oasis”—a refuge for plants, animals, and humans even during dry eras, he says. Another paleolake called Mundafan, deep in the forbidding Empty Quarter, was once surrounded by grasslands, as shown by studies of microscopic plant remains called phytoliths.

Breeze’s team is also mapping a river system, now largely hidden by dunes or shrunk to seasonal wadis, which once flowed north out of the Yemeni highlands, across central Arabia, and into a broad river valley that today is the shallow Persian Gulf. Another system included a river, 2 meters deep, 20 meters wide, and flanked by grasses and palms, that gushed out of the mountains of Oman and traveled 400 kilometers across what is now barren land, according to phytolith and sedimentology work in the United Arab Emirates by Oxford Brookes’ Parker.

Freshwater snails (top) and lake sediments show a wetter environment for ancient Arabia.
PHOTO: RICHARD JENNINGS/UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD (2)

Discoveries of ancient animal bones provide additional confirmation that during the past half-million years, Arabia periodically was wet enough to draw fauna from Africa and other parts of Asia. Last October, a team led by the University of Oxford’s Christopher Stimpson found bones of a panther and elephant in a 325,000-year-old fossil field near the oasis town of Tayma in the Nefud.

How African animals crossed into Arabia—whether across the Sinai Peninsula at one end of the Red Sea or over the Bab el Mandeb strait separating Djibouti from Yemen at the other end (see map)—is a matter of debate. Today the southern passage (the name is Arabic for “gateway of anguish” because of its treacherous currents) is 30 kilometers wide. It would have been wider during warmer and wetter eras, although an island chain north of the strait may have made the crossing possible. Baboons, ostrich, mongoose, leopard, cheetah, and genet likely took this route, says geographer Nick Drake of King’s College London.

Modern humans appear to have taken the northern route, into the Sinai Peninsula, during the crucial wet period 125,000 years ago. Human bones—the oldest with modern traits found outside Africa—have been excavated from two Israeli caves, and dated to as long ago as 120,000 years (Science, 13 May 2005, p. 965). Scientists have long assumed that these early wayfarers died out before spreading deeper into Asia, in part because the terrain between what is now Israel and Iran was hostile desert. “This model is so entrenched,” says Petraglia, with a note of impatience. “It was difficult to publish anything to the contrary.”

But if Arabia was an appealing route rather than a barrier, he says, then these early modern humans could have tracked familiar game and plants across a welcoming savanna dotted with lakes and crisscrossed with rivers, ultimately crossing into the Indian subcontinent. Arriving in time to experience the fall of ash from the Indonesian volcano of Toba 74,000 years ago, India’s early moderns crafted tools resembling those in Africa, he argues. And if Arabia was indeed a steppingstone for eastward-journeying modern humans, its sands must hold stones and bones recording their passage.

EARLIER WAVES OF HOMININS certainly left their mark. The University of Oxford’s Huw Groucutt recalls his astonishment on stumbling upon one of the largest collections of tools he had ever seen, on the second day of a 2010 survey in the Jubbah region. The stones lay spread out by the thousands across the barren landscape, seemingly as undisturbed as when they were dropped by their ancient users.

Jubbah is no anomaly. Groucutt and others are finding hundreds of sites littered with many thousands of tools. Though few are dated, their styles suggest that substantial populations of archaic hominins made Arabia their home well before modern humans came out of Africa. Along one ancient riverbed in the Nefud, for example, archaeologists found 3000 artifacts on the surface identified as Acheulean, a type of tool first used as early as 1.8 million years ago and linked to Homo erectus.

Ancient people in Arabia left behind tools like this stone point, 7 centimeters high, from paleolake Mundafan. PHOTO: IAN CARTWRIGHT/SCHOOL OF ARCHAEOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Most of the Arabian artifacts appear more recent, typical of the Middle Paleolithic—a period from about 200,000 years ago until 45,000 years ago, when modern humans might have been spreading across the peninsula. These carefully prepared cores or cobbles were used to produce predictably shaped flakes for cutting and scraping. These are the kind of artifacts Petraglia saw in the Riyadh storerooms—but their precise ages are unknown. Tools can be dated only if they’ve been dug from dated strata, and the Riyadh artifacts, like thousands of others, were simply picked up from the ground. “Until 2011, there wasn’t a single dated [stone] tool in all of Arabia,” Petraglia says.

In the past 4 years, however, archaeologists have found a handful of buried artifacts that could be dated using optically stimulated luminescence, which reveals how long an object has been buried. One of the most important finds came from near a cave shelter in the United Arab Emirates called Jebel Faya, some 2000 kilometers east of the African coast. There, a team from the University of Tübingen in Germany led by Hans-Peter Uerpmann found tool assemblages that they dated to 125,000 years ago (Science, 28 January 2011, p. 453). The same year, archaeologist Jeffrey Rose and colleagues pinpointed another buried site on the Dhofar coast to about 100,000 years ago. And Petraglia’s team has dated objects from five sites near Jubbah to as early as 211,000 years old, with most clustering between 90,000 and 74,000 years ago.

Researchers are now gleaning dates from about 20 other sites in Arabia, and more datable sites are likely to be uncovered soon. Three-quarters of the paleolakes that Breeze surveyed were rimmed with Middle Paleolithic tools.

THE RELATIVELY RECENT dates of these artifacts suggest that modern humans could have been the toolmakers, and the style of the tools is right, too, say Petraglia, Uerpmann, and Rose. They argue that the Arabian Middle Paleolithic tools bear striking resemblance to those made in Northeast Africa between 125,000 and 70,000 years ago.

Even today the southern edge of Arabia turns green when grazed by the monsoon (top, in Oman), but most of the peninsula stays dry year-round.
PHOTOS: (TOP TO BOTTOM) RANDOLPH CAGUINTUAN/REUTERS; ADRIAN G. PARKER/OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY

That idea got a shot of support from an 8 August paper published online in the Journal of Human Evolution by Eleanor Scerri of the University of Bordeaux in France and colleagues including Groucutt. The team analyzed artifacts from Jubbah and from Northeast Africa and concluded that although the materials differ, the methods of producing cores and flakes are similar. But Scerri says that some Arabian tools look distinct from those of Africa, with regional flavors that suggest diverse populations or even different types of hominins.

Other researchers say that until archaeologists find the bones of the toolmakers, their identity will remain wide open. Chris Stringer, a paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum, suggests they could have been Neandertals, who survived in Europe until about 40,000 years ago. Although Neandertal remains have not been found south of Iraqi Kurdistan, more than 1500 kilometers north of Riyadh, the new climate data make it conceivable that our extinct cousins, too, were drawn to a green Arabia, Stringer says. “Why not?”

Stony Brook University’s Shea adds that the recently discovered Denisovans, archaic humans apparently once widespread in Asia, could also have fashioned the tools after reaching Arabia from the east. “Nobody knows who or what was running around South Asia back then,” he says. “Why nobody thinks populations could disperse into Arabia from South Asia is a mystery to me.”

A few skeptics adamantly reject the idea of an ancient Arabia bustling with modern humans. To archaeologist Paul Mellars of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, it is inconceivable that modern humans successfully sojourned outside Africa before 55,000 years or so ago. Even then, he says, they did not meander through the Arabian Peninsula but hugged the coast in a quick sprint to Southeast Asia and Australia. “Colonizing the deserts in Arabiawould be a suicidal act,” he says. “You can say Green Arabia, but it was only green for brief periods.” He suggests that any Arabian forays by modern humans were short and ineffectual.

Petraglia admits that the picture remains murky. Until he or others can bring home the bones, “Arabia is a complete unknown when it comes to species,” he says. Meanwhile, he says, a slew of peer-reviewed papers will be published in the next year or two as teams work in the field and lab, sharpening the picture of the ancient green place that might have hosted modern humans.

At the Oxford meeting, Prince Sultan bin Salman, a former shuttle astronaut, pledged to create a Green Arabia Institute devoted to research on climate and the early occupation of Saudi Arabia, a sign that research is likely to continue far beyond the ERC grant that ends in 2017. Petraglia himself will be back on the Arabian sands in November. “I can’t wait to get back out there,” he says. “It’s a gold mine. Without Arabia, we can’t tell an accurate story of human migration.”

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