Roads of Arabia

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THE PREHISTORIC
POPULATIONS
Marie-Louise Inizan
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with its deserts – the Nafud in the north and the Rub’ al-
Khali, the largest expanse of sand in the world, in the south – was long thought to be a land
where no form of life had ever been sustainable. As a result, there was no point in attempting
to trace the history of its remote prehistoric past.
Nowadays, however, the country is seen as occupying a unique geographical position,
for just beyond the Red Sea on its western border lies East Africa, the recognized cradle of
humanity. Recent discoveries have shown that only a single species of the genus Homo
(Homo erectus) left East Africa for Eurasia approximately two million years ago, and this has
spurred renewed interest in the routes our very distant ancestors took to journey out of
Africa and conquer the planet Earth.
(preceding pages)
Hijaz landscape,
photographs by Humberto da Silveira
(opposite)
Prehistoric tools
For a long time, there was one predominant scenario: a land route along the Nile.
However, in the last few years, another scenario has arisen involving the Arabian Peninsula
(fig. 1). Could Arabia be a geographical bridge between East Africa and Asia, separated as
it is from the former only by the Red Sea? East Africa, as we know, is also considered the
cradle of modern humans, Homo sapiens, who emerged roughly two hundred thousand years
ago, and Homo sapiens may have also migrated to Eurasia across the Red Sea. Finally, a mystery
enshrouds the entire Arabian Peninsula: what happened during the Upper Palaeolithic
(40,000 to 12,000 years ago)? No prehistoric site has ever been found from that period,
either on land or under water.
Starting with the last warming period, however, which corresponds to the “Arabian
Humid Period” approximately 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, things start to change: archaeological
exploration and better-preserved artefacts have enabled us to identify the presence of
original indigenous cultures across the entire Arabian Peninsula. And the discovery of rock
art – a continuous practice whose earliest specimens go back at least 8 or 9,000 years – provides
us with a valuable symbolic and aesthetic resource for exploring the long history of the
nomadic peoples of Arabia.
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