Prehistoryc. 122,000–67,000 years ago · Rub' al Khali, Arabian Peninsula
Ancient lake beds in Arabia's Empty Quarter held water but no stone tools
A survey of about 1,500 km found old lake beds at 55 of 125 desert sites, and the team argues early humans also needed stone for tools.
In brief 3 key points
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- Ancient lake beds found deep in Arabia's largest sand desert.
- No stone tools or toolmaking stone turned up along the route.
- Spatial model suggests settlers needed both water and good stone.
A survey across Arabia's Rub' al Khali (the Empty Quarter), the largest sand sea in the world, found traces of ancient lakes at 55 of 125 sites. It found no stone tools and no trace of people. The lake deposits match sections dated to roughly 122,000 to 67,000 years ago, when humans lived around the desert's edges.
The researchers argue that early humans settled where water and good toolmaking stone occurred together, and that water alone was not enough. The study is published in Nature. Its first author is Rudolf W. Dellmour. Phys.org names Jeffrey I. Rose of the University of Algarve in Portugal as one of the team.
Lake beds but no tools in the interior
The Rub' al Khali covers about 650,000 square kilometres of southern Arabia. During wet phases of the Pleistocene, a stronger Indian Ocean monsoon raised water tables and filled lakes across the basin. Models of human dispersal have treated these interior basins as likely places for people to live.
Those models had never been checked on the ground in the desert interior. Archaeological evidence from this period comes from the margins. Sites there include Mundafan (about 96,000 to 77,000 years ago), Jebel Faya (about 134,000 to 80,000), Umm al Sha'al (about 87,000 to 71,000) and the Dhofar Nejd plateau (about 109,000 to 95,000).
The team travelled a route of about 1,500 km through the central desert. At 125 places between the dunes they looked for old lake deposits, recorded the local rocks and searched the ground for tools. Ground visibility was over 95%.
At lake sites they found carbonate lake sediments, freshwater snail and clam shells, and fragments of ostrich eggshell. According to Phys.org, these small finds suggest the team would have spotted any tools left behind. None were found.
The survey also found almost no knappable stone, meaning rock such as chert that can be flaked into tools. It turned up at only 10 of the 125 localities (8%), all at the western and eastern ends of the route. The nearest known outcrops of such stone lie more than 200 km from the surveyed basins. In the centre, the chert-bearing rocks are buried under younger sediments.
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A model of water and stone across Arabia
The team then built a model of the Arabian Peninsula from geological maps and reconstructed river networks. They tested it first in Oman, against 301 known findspots of the period. It showed that likely living areas were narrow zones where water and stone met.
Across the whole peninsula, 57% of the land within reach of water lies on rock formations without knappable stone. The team compared the model with 362 known sites. More sites than chance would predict fell in zones with both resources. Fewer than chance fell where neither occurred.
Adding stone made the model better at telling known sites apart from other places. On the standard measure used, its score rose from 0.695 to 0.768. Some known sites still fall in low-scoring zones. The authors put this down to the coarse geological map, which misses small local patches of usable stone.
“Dispersal models that omit raw-material geology may systematically overestimate the habitable range of stone-tool-dependent populations.”
Rudolf W. Dellmour and colleagues, writing in Nature
The authors say similar patterns from Africa, North America and Asia indicate that the limit is not unique to Arabia. Archaeologist Emanuele Cancellieri of the University of Algarve discusses the study in a News and Views piece in the same issue of Nature.
Sources (2)
Peer-reviewed paperfrom University of Algarve
- Early humans needed more than access to water to settle ancient Arabian deserts (Phys.org)
- Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibilit (Nature)
Paper: Rudolf W. Dellmour et al., Stone and water governed early human settlement of the desert, Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-11180-5
Edited by Guiseppe Weijermars
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