The nature of human dispersals out of Africa has remained elusive because of the poor resolution of paleoecological data in direct association with remains of the earliest non-African people. Here, we report hominin and non-hominin mammalian tracks from an ancient lake deposit in the Arabian Peninsula, dated within the last interglacial. The findings, it is argued, likely represent the oldest securely dated evidence for Homo sapiens in Arabia. The paleoecological evidence indicates a well-watered semi-arid grassland setting during human movements into the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia. We conclude that visitation to the lake was transient, likely serving as a place to drink and to forage, and that late Pleistocene human and mammalian migrations and landscape use patterns in Arabia were inexorably linked.

由于与最早的非非洲人遗骸直接相关的古生态数据分辨率不佳，人类从非洲扩散出去的性质仍然难以捉摸。在这里，我们报告了阿拉伯半岛一个古老湖泊沉积物中的人类和非人类哺乳动物的踪迹，可追溯到上一次间冰期。有人认为，这些发现可能代表了阿拉伯智人最古老的安全证据。古生态学证据表明，在人类进入沙特阿拉伯内夫德沙漠的过程中，这里有一个水分充足的半干旱草原环境。我们得出的结论是，对湖泊的访问是短暂的，很可能是一个饮酒和觅食的地方，并且晚更新世人类和哺乳动物的迁徙以及阿拉伯的景观利用模式密不可分。