Human behavioral strategies in the desert environments of Southeast Arabia during the Late Pleistocene: A case study from Jebel Faya, UAE

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Deserts form about 20 % of the terrestrial habitats and constitute one of the world's major ecosystems. Given the considerable antiquity of many of the great deserts in addition to their geographic position at important points along potential expansion routes of modern humans, desert regions must have played an important role in human evolution. Extreme habitats such as deserts are often modeled as either barriers or corridors. Such binary models, however, stand increasingly in contrast to the complex settlement dynamics and expansion processes suggested by the current genetic, fossil and archaeological records. We argue here that research on hominin behavior in desert habitats can provide key data for the refinement of hominin evolutionary models. In this project, we will having this, we will test models of human desert adaptation and characterize the evolution of collect new archaeological and paleoenvironmental data from our study region in Sharjah (UAE). human behavioral strategies in the desert environments of our study region. To reach these goals we will integrate archaeological, paleoenvironmental, chronological and micromorphological research into one interdisciplinary effort. Results of this project will add new information about the evolution of the human behavioral repertoire in the desert habitats of SE Arabia during the Late Pleistocene and add new data on the evolution of paleoenvironmental conditions in the region. These results can amongst others be used to refine our understanding about patterns of human evolution and can serve to test models for the expansion of modern humans out of Africa from an archaeological perspective. Our results will provide an important contribution to the current scientific discourse.