The fundamental goal of this project is to gain insight into how humans spread from an originally limited region within Africa to a worldwide distribution which includes all continents. Understanding how this process - especially in its earliest stages - took place has the potential to shed light on basic human adaptations.
With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Amanuel Beyin and an international team of colleagues from the US and the Sudan will conduct one season of high-risk archaeological exploration along the Sudanese Red Sea coast (northeast Africa) to locate prehistoric sites associated with early human use of coastal resources and dispersal events out of Africa. There is an emerging anthropological consensus on the first appearance of early modern humans in Africa around 200,000 years ago, and their subsequent dispersals to Europe and Asia. However, there is disagreement about the specific routes along which early humans dispersed out of Africa (e.g. the Sinai Peninsula vs the Bab al Mandab strait). The possibility of early humans using coastal landscapes as potential dispersal conduits during their migration out of Africa and beyond is receiving increasing support among researchers in recent years. As a region featuring a long and heterogeneous coastal strip, the proposed study area in the Sudanese Red Sea zone represents a vital region for assessing current hypotheses concerning early human coastal migration out of Africa. The proposed high-risk archaeological exploration will test the hypothesis that the Red Sea basin served as a viable refugium and dispersal corridor for early humans.
The nature of the research at this stage requires finding paleoanthropological sites, and describing their geological settings and archaeological contents (such as types of artifacts and fossils and their distribution patterns). To achieve these goals, the proposed research will employ vehicle-assisted pedestrian surveys (field team walking along established transects), recording artifact and fossil concentrations with a GPS, and test excavations at selected stratified sites. Field data compiled during this pilot survey will be entered into a Geographic Information System database specifically designed to accommodate site proveniences, artifact/fossil density, locations of important environmental features (river channels, shorelines and stable plateau) and lithic raw material locations. The results of this pilot work will enable us to pursue a long-term, interdisciplinary fieldwork in this important region.
The intellectual merits of this high-risk exploration are that, by documenting new prehistoric coastal sites from a less explored part of the Red Sea basin, the research will generate fresh archaeological data with which to clarify: a) the role that the African side of the Red Sea basin played in human adaptations, survival and dispersals out of Africa, b) possible demographic and cultural connections among hominid groups who occupied northeastern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia and, c) compare the nature of prehistoric human adaption there with neighboring regions. In a wider geographic context, this research will contribute to global theoretical debates surrounding the geographic contexts of early human dispersals out of Africa and the role of coastal habitats in stimulating hominid evolution, adaptations and dispersals.
The broader impact of the project is that, it will contribute to advancing greater international paleoanthropological research collaboration among researchers - including two ethnic minorities in the discipline - from two US institutions and two Sudanese universities. In the future, it will provide diverse research opportunities for students from both American and African institutions.
