In the news
Lost Civilization May Have Existed Beneath the Persian Gulf
LiveScience.com, 9 December 2010
Veiled beneath the Persian Gulf, a once-fertile landmass may have supported some of the earliest humans outside Africa some 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, a new review of research suggests.
At its peak, the floodplain now below the Gulf would have been about the size of Great Britain, and then shrank as water began to flood the area. Then, about 8,000 years ago, the land would have been swallowed up by the Indian Ocean, the review scientist said.
The study, which is detailed in the December issue of the journal Current Anthropology, has broad implications for aspects of human history. For instance, scientists have debated over when early modern humans exited Africa, with dates as early as 125,000 years ago and as recent as 60,000 years ago (the more recent date is the currently accepted paradigm), according to study researcher Jeffrey Rose, an archaeologist at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
Oman Today, 1 May 2010
Malathy Garewal writes:
It was March 22, with just a few more days left of this year’s archaeological dig in the Dhofar region of Oman. Dr Jeffrey Rose, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham, and his international team of archaeologists had almost given up hope of finding anything significant this year.
125,000 years ago first human settlement began in Sultanate
Oman Daily Observer, 7 April 2010
Tools with footprints found in Wadi Aybut - By Hasan Kamoonpuri - MUSCAT — A new study by a British archaeologist says that the first human settlement in Oman began about 125,000 years ago. Dr Jeffrey I Rose, Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham, UK, said this during a lecture here yesterday on “Oman at the Dawn of Time: The Archaeology of Human Origin in Southern Arabia.”
Oman a staging post for early humans
The Week, 14 April 2010
Last week saw a sparsely attended lecture on early humans in Oman taking place at the Cultural Club in Qurm.
Organised by the Department of Excavations and Archaeological Studies of the Ministry of Heritage and Culture, this lecture by Dr Jeffrey Rose may just be the beginning of a storm that might very well set the archaeological world on its ears and earn Oman a place on the archaeological map right next to Africa.