Emerging archeological evidence points to early human habitation 100,000 years ago in a Persian "Gulf Oasis" now underwater, suggests one archeologist.

In the upcoming Current Anthropology journal study, Jeffrey Rose of the United Kingdom's University of Birmingham, points to stone tools from 40 archeological sites throughout the Middle East to suggest that modern humans left Africa earlier than many model suggest (typically around 60,000 years ago), and populated Arabian coastal areas now underwater.

"The emerging picture of prehistoric Arabia suggests that early modern humans were able to survive periodic hyperarid oscillations by contracting into environmental refugia around the coastal margins of the peninsula," begins the study. The end of an Ice Age flooded today's Persian Gulf around 8,000 years ago, Rose notes, as sea levels rose. "There is a noticeable spike in settlement activity around the shoreline of the Gulf between 8,500 and 6,000 years ago," Rose says.

Archeologist Geoffrey Bailey of the United Kingdom's University of York, says the study's suggestion that Arabian continental shelves served as good environments for human during Ice Ages, "and served as a source of population expansion in the early Holocene (last 10,000 years), is an attractive one."

However, Robert Carter of the UK's Oxford Brookes University, questions the links that Rose sees between ancient stone age tools and the later Sumerian civilization, in a commentary accompanying the report.

"Unless one completely dismisses the notion that lithic technology is passed down the generations, there are problems with assigning both the populations of southern Mesopotamia and eastern Arabia to the same demographic origin in the Gulf basin. The leptolithic (blade-based) industry of early southern Mesopotamia has little in common with the Arabian bifacial tradition(s) that prevailed in the Arabian Peninsula between 8 and 6 (thousand years ago)," Carter writes.

Rose alludes to suggestions that the Biblical "Garden of Eden" and Noah's Ark stories may have a basis in the pre-flood Persian Gulf, to conclude his study. "Albeit epiphenomenal, it is interesting to note that the oldest known version of the ubiquitous Near Eastern flood myth, the "Eridu genesis", was written by the inhabitants of this region. The link between flood mythology and marine incursion into the Arabo-Persian Gulf basin has already been thoroughly explored by a number of authors and does not require any further elucidation"

(Reader note: In reference to the so-called "Arabo-Persian Gulf basin", Rose footnotes his paper to say, "The author acknowledges that 'Arabian Gulf' and 'Persian Gulf' are more typically used to refer to this body of water; however, to avoid contention, this paper adopts the convention of hyphenating the two designations.")

"Connecting the flood myth with any particular period is problematic," says archeologist Carrie Hritz of Penn State, noting studies showing repeated shifts in the Persian Gulf's shoreline, as well as overflowing rivers. "We have evidence from antiquity of highly destructive flood events throughout Mesopotamia, any one of which could have contribute to the formation of the myth that has some root in reality. Despite past archaeological work at Ur, there's just little evidence to date this to any particular event," she says, by email.

And archeologist Paul Mellars of the United Kingdom's University of Cambridge says he is skeptical of the Current Anthropology study's suggestion that early modern humans peopled Arabia more than 75,000 years ago. "I think this is just speculation," Mellars says. "And there is no archeological or skeletal evidence that supports the speculation."

Genetic evidence most strongly suggests that people emerged from Africa for good some 60,000 years ago, Mellars adds. The genetic argument for people expanding from a stillborn expansion of anatomically-modern-looking humans documented into modern-day Israel about 90,000 years ago, and from there to Arabia and India, he says, "relies upon the selection of a few points favoring the argument, and ignores the great weight of geneticist's views of how late modern humans emerged from Africa."

By Dan Vergano