Dating of beads sets new timeline for early humans

Beads from the site of Ksar Akil. Credit: Katerina Douka and Natural History Museum London

An international team of researchers led by Oxford University has new dating evidence indicating when the earliest fully modern humans arrived in the Near East, the region known as the Middle East today.

They have obtained the radiocarbon dates of marine shell beads found at Ksar Akil, a key archaeological site in Lebanon, which allowed them to calculate that the oldest human fossil from the same sequence of archaeological layers is 42,400–41,700 years old. This is significant because the age of the earliest fossils, directly and indirectly dated, of modern humans found in Europe is roughly similar.

This latest discovery throws up intriguing new possibilities about the routes taken by the earliest modern humans out of Africa, says the study published online by the journal PLOS ONE.

Body or clothes decoration 

The research team radiocarbon dated 20 marine shells from the top 15 metres of archaeological layers at Ksar Akil, north of Beirut. The shells were perforated [...] pasthorizonspr.com


Actualización 13-09-13. Nuevas dataciones de Ksar Akil cuestionan la procedencia de los europeos modernos


Actualización 16-09-13. Los humanos modernos llegaron a Oriente Medio y a Europa al mismo tiempo
Un grupo de arqueólogos dirigidos desde la Universidad de Oxford han encontrado nuevas pruebas de que los humanos modernos llegaron a Oriente Medio más o menos al tiempo que a Europa, en ambos casos procedentes de África. Para ello, han datado con carbono-14 cuentas de conchas marinas usadas como adornos. Este hallazgo abre el debate de cuáles fueron las vías de llegada de los humanos modernos a Europa...