Al-Ahsa Oasis is now a rare green patch in Saudi Arabia
Michael Runkel / Robert Harding / Alamy
Today Arabia is a wonderful desert, but it has been green and has been more than once in the last 8 million years. This means that African animals could be wandering to the area. They were potentially limited to Africa including early human relatives.
“Deserts are activating and shutting down in time,” he says Michael Petraglia Brisbane, Australian Griffith University. “We get out of Africa. Why not hominins?”
