The bodies are still missing, but a prehistoric toolkit discovered in the United Arab Emirates has led some archaeologists to propose a more complex scenario for humanity's emigration out of Africa.

Uncovered at a Jebel Faya rock shelter, just west of the Straits of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, the tools are 125,000 years old. Previous estimates placed the dispersal of modern humans from North Africa around 70,000 years ago. If correct, this new study indicates that humans in eastern Africa left earlier, and traveled to Arabia.

The tools include small hand axes, scrapers and notched tools called denticulates. They're described Jan. 27 in Science. According to researchers led by University of London paleogeographer Simon Armitage, the tools resemble those made in the same era by humans in eastern Africa, rather than tools found at later sites along the Mediterranean’s eastern border.

On the basis of these tools, Armitage and co-authors propose that humans crossed from eastern Africa to Arabia around 130,000 years ago. Lower sea levels may have opened a path, and increased rainfall would have made the Jebel Faya area less arid than it is today.

From southeast Arabia, humans "would have reached South Asia much earlier than assumed and would have had more time to adapt to all kinds of environments encountered in the whole of Eurasia,” wrote study co-author and University of Tübingen archaeologist Hans-Peter Uerpmann.

The findings support a scenario suggested by University of Birmingham archaeologist Jeffrey Rose in December 2010 in Current Anthropology. He described how a "Gulf Oasis" could have sheltered humans 100,000 years ago, and even earlier.

Skeletons would provide an important test of the toolmakers' proposed identity. When asked if any remains had been found, however, Uerpmann said, “No bones at all. The earliest bone-finds of ‘moderns’ are from Qafzeh and Skhul in Israel.”

At about the same age as the Jebel Faya tools, these controversial fossils may represent the oldest anatomically modern humans outside of Africa, although a recent *American Journal of Physical Anthropology *paper made a poorly substantiated claim of 400,000-year-old humans in Israel’s Qesem Cave.

The new study "provides important clues that early modern humans might have dispersed from Africa across Arabia, as far as the Straits of Hormuz, by 120,000 years ago,” said Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum and "Out of Africa" scholar.

Given the disparity between the Jebel Faya tools and those found at Skhul and Qafzeh caves in Israel, however, Stringer wonders if separate populations may have taken different paths out of Africa.

“Could there have been separate dispersals,” he asks, “one from East Africa into Arabia, and another from North Africa into the Levant?”

*Images: *Science

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