This #FieldworkFriday. A thread on the site of Mundafan al Buhayrah, the first dated Pleistocene archaeological site from the Empty Quarter of Arabia, that we published five years ago. About 85 thousand years ago humans were making stone tools on the edge of a lake.

You can read our paper on the site here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379115001705

This is how the site looks: the white sediments are lake sediments, stone tools are found in the overlying sediments, more representative of marshy conditions.

There are many stone tools on the surface, having been recently eroded from the sediments.

And lots of buried stone tools were recovered (plus a few pieces of ostrich eggshell)

Stone tools from this site make a valuable comparative sample. They are very similar to contemporary tools made by Homo sapiens in Africa and the Levant, showing that early dispersals were extending further east than traditionally thought.