We found evidence of hominin settlement in the Sudanese Red Sea area in the form of stone artifacts that suggests this region was a key early dispersal corridor—and possibly the first.
Africa is the birthplace of humanity. From the time of our lineage’s split from the chimpanzee line around seven million years ago, the continent has remained the primary homeland for successive hominin species—of which modern humans are the sole survivors.
This movement played a vital role in introducing ancient humans to new ideas, survival opportunities and risks. Those experiences helped our lineage to emerge as a resilient and adept species, which is evident in the technological ingenuity of modern humans. Recently, we led a research team to fill the existing evidence gap about our ancestors’ route out of Africa. Our focus was on the western periphery of the Red Sea. This area links the fossil-rich Horn of Africa and the Sinai Peninsula, which is the only land bridge that could have facilitated direct hominin movement between Africa and Eurasia in the past two million years.
The stone tool techno-complex associated with handaxe-making is conventionally called “Acheulean”, after a site in France called Saint-Acheul where such toolkits were first discovered in the mid-19th century. The handaxes we found reveal signs of controlled shaping and greater selectivity of raw material.
More work to comeThese finds, and others at the site, have not yet been dated. But based on the technological features of the artifacts so far recorded in the study area, these sites seem to be comparable to East African sites dated to between 1.25 million and 500 000 years ago.
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