Archaeologists on Monday announced the discovery of a fossilized human finger bone in the desert of Saudi Arabia that they said was 85,000 years old.

If confirmed, the finding would be the first and earliest Homo sapiens fossil found on the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the oldest specimen of our species to be directly dated outside of Africa and its doorstep, the Levant.

Along with recent finds of 80,000-year-old human teeth from Asia and 65,000-year-old human relics from Australia, the Arabian finger bone provides further evidence that early modern humans spread out of Africa much earlier and farther than previously thought.

“It’s a discovery that we’ve been expecting for a while,” said Robyn Inglis, an archaeologist at the University of York in England who was not involved in the research. “It’s become increasingly clear that humans dispersed far out of Africa and the Levant before 60,000 years ago, a date suggested by genetics.”