The Evolution of the Red Sea as a Human Habitat During the Quaternary Period

Abstract

This chapter summarises current knowledge about the deep history of human occupation in the Arabian Peninsula and more specifically examines the likely role of the Red Sea escarpment and coastal region both as a major zone of human occupation in early prehistory and as a key pathway for the movements of people and the transmission of cultural ideas between Africa and Eurasia. This is a highly topical issue in the international literature at present both because of new archaeological investigations that are providing new dates for early Stone Age settlements in various parts of the Arabian Peninsula and because of genetic studies that highlight the southern Red Sea and southern Arabian Peninsula as a major ‘corridor’ of early human settlement and connection between Africa and Asia. The time range of these processes covers at least the past 150,000 years and could extend to 1 million years or more and therefore places a high premium on new understandings about the impact of climate change, sea-level change and other geological processes on the suitability of different areas of the Arabian landscape for human settlement and dispersal. This chapter discusses the archaeological and climatic evidence for Quaternary occupation, the effect of sea-level changes on the possibility of sea crossings of the southern Red Sea, the evidence for coastal archaeological settlements demonstrating early human interest in the exploitation of marine resources and seafaring, and new investigations in the Farasan Islands region that are searching for traces of submerged landscapes and archaeological sites formed at periods of lower sea level.