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The Red Sea, Coastal Landscapes, and Hominin Dispersals

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The Evolution of Human Populations in Arabia

Part of the book series: Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology ((VERT))

Abstract

The Red Sea has typically been viewed as a barrier to early human movement between Africa and Asia over the past 5 million years, and one that could be circumvented only through narrow exit points at either end, vulnerable to blockage by physical or climatic barriers (Fig. 1). It is one of several significant obstacles cutting across ‘savannahstan’ (Dennell and Roebroeks, 2005), a broad swathe of herbivore-rich savannah and grassy plains that began to extend over a vast area stretching from West Africa to China with climatic cooling from at least 2.5 Ma, and a key macro-environmental context for early hominin dispersal1. However, this concept of the Red Sea Basin as a barrier should not obscure the fact that its coastal regions also hold considerable potential attractions for early human settlement, especially under climatic conditions wetter than today, including a complex tectonic and volcanic topography not unlike that of the African Rift, capable of providing localized fertility for plant and animal life, tactical opportunities for pursuit of herbivores and protection from predators (King and Bailey, 2006), along with inshore and intertidal marine resources.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Other comparable barriers are the Sahara desert, which would have constrained movement between sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, and the arc of the Taurus-Zagros mountains and the Iranian plateau, providing a series of physical or climatic barriers extending from Anatolia to the Indian subcontinent.

  2. 2.

    It would be fair to say that there is also no decisive evidence to refute the possibility of such movements.

  3. 3.

    Strictly speaking this is a strike–slip fault structure resulting in the creation of long and relatively narrow valleys, but with many of the same tectonic and topographic features as the African Rift, including lake basins, fault barriers and lava fields.

  4. 4.

    This site is referred to as Al Qamah in Bailey et al. (2007a) to distinguish it from a Holocene shell midden to the north of the town of Al Birk. It is one of a number of sites in the area and is in fact closer to Al Birk.

  5. 5.

    Charles Darwin, of course, famously observed that ‘To knock a limpet from the rocks does not require even cunning, that lowest power of the mind’ (Darwin, 1839, pp. 235–236).

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Abdullah Al-Sharekh, Nic Flemming, Geoffrey King, Kurt Lambeck and Claudio Vita-Finzi for discussions of Red Sea archaeology, geology and environment, and to NERC through its EFCHED program (Environmental Factors in Human Evolution and Dispersal), the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, Saudi Aramco, the Saudi British Bank and Shell Companies Overseas for funding the fieldwork in the southern Red Sea that forms the foundation for this chapter.

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  1. Department of Archaeology, King’s Manor, University of York, York, YO1 7EP, UK

    Geoff Bailey

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Correspondence to Geoff Bailey .

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  1. Leverhulme Centre for Human, University of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Street 13A, Cambridge, CB2 1QH, United Kingdom

    Michael D. Petraglia

  2. Dept. Anthropology & Geography, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, OX3 0BP, United Kingdom

    Jeffrey I. Rose

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Bailey, G. (2010). The Red Sea, Coastal Landscapes, and Hominin Dispersals. In: Petraglia, M., Rose, J. (eds) The Evolution of Human Populations in Arabia. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2719-1_2

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