Ancient life unearthed

Vesela Todorova

• Last Updated: March 29. 2009 2:08PM UAE / March 29. 2009 10:08AM GMT

The ancient secrets lay buried in the sand for centuries. In the end, and not without irony, it was the hunt for oil – the driving force of the UAE’s future – that unearthed its forgotten past.

Fifty years ago this month, an expedition of Danish archaeologists from the Aarhus Museum of Prehistory began work on the island of Umm al-Nar, a few hundred metres off the coast where today Abu Dhabi is joined to the mainland by Al Maqta bridge. They had been working 400km away in Bahrain, excavating burial mounds thought to date back to the third millennium BC, but their attention had been drawn to Abu Dhabi by Temple Hillyard, a BP employee and amateur archaeologist who had discovered mounds on Umm al-Nar similar to those in Bahrain.

Today, Umm al-Nar is home to the infrastructure of a modern city – a port, power station, desalination plant – but in 1959 Peter Glob, director of the National Museum in Copenhagen, and his colleagues found a barren landscape ripe for discovery, containing evidence of a settlement and graves and a people who were skilful in smelting copper and had strong trade ties with other parts of Asia.

After years of work, they concluded that the sites in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain, each inhabited between 2,500 and 2,000BC, were related “components of a Gulf civilisation engaged, like their counterparts today, in trading across the known world”, according to Malcolm Peck in his 1986 book The United Arab Emirates – A Venture in Unity. That culture became known as Umm an-Nar.

Important though the finds on Umm al-Nar were – and the golden jubilee of the first dig to throw light on the nation’s ancient past was celebrated in Abu Dhabi this month with an international archaeology conference – they proved to be the precursor of other excavations that showed that human habitation in the UAE dated back more than 80,000 years.

Among those who have followed in Glob’s footsteps is Dr Mark Beech, cultural landscapes manager at the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH). Since 1994, he has worked on some of the most significant archaeological research studies in the UAE, including the discovery of Abu Dhabi’s oldest human remains, which are 7,500 years old.

Fossil discoveries have shone a light even further back into the past, long before the first people arrived. The UAE’s oldest fossils, remains of marine organisms 70 million years old, were found on Jebel Hafit, but the country’s most extensive fossil record is in Al Gharbia, the former Western Region, within a geological region known as the Baynunah Formation. This is an area of some 5,000 square km, extending roughly 30km along the coast near Yas Island from Ruwais to Jebel Barakah and as much as 45km inland. Millions of years ago, a large, shallow river system ran through this area, creating an oasis of savannah-like vegetation within a surrounding desert.

The fossils the area has yielded are of plants and the remains of creatures including turtles, crocodiles and catfish and, from the land, elephants, hippopotami and sabre-tooth cats.

These remains, which are between six million and eight million years old, represent the most extensive such record in the whole of Arabia and their scientific significance is considerable. They are evidence that Al Gharbia’s ecosystem during the Miocene period was very different from the desert habitat of today but, most importantly, the plants and animals were similar to those found in today’s East Africa, proving a geographical association.

“As soon as I saw these fossils I realised I was looking at something I had seen in Kenya from six million years ago,” says Professor Andrew Hill of Yale University, who first visited the UAE in 1989. “Until we found the fossils no one knew Arabia was like Africa.”

Many of the earliest discoveries were made at Jebel Barakah, a red sandstone outcrop that is the highest point of the Baynunah formation, first explored by scientists in the 1960s.

The late Peter Whybrow of the Natural History Museum in London did some work in the area in the 1970s and later worked extensively with Prof Hill and with Dr Walid Yasin al Tikrit, the archaeology manager at ADACH, to unravel much of Al Gharbia’s Miocene past.

Studies of the Baynunah formation continue today and, so far, fossils have been collected from 40 locations. In 2003, alerted by Mubarak al-Mansouri, a UAE national, scientists from the Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey discovered at Mleisa the fossilised footprints of elephants thought to be between six million and eight million years old.

A year later, during a survey for the Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Company, more fossils, including a complete elephant tusk and the lower jaw of another elephant, were identified and subsequently excavated.

The palaeontological finds in Al Gharbia opened another window on the more recent past, paving the way for the discovery of the oldest traces of human life in the UAE.

During his first visit in 1989, Prof Hill noticed areas with many stone fragments scattered on the surface. He shared his suspicion that these could be artefacts with Prof Sally McBrearty, then an associate professor at the department of anthropology at the University of Connecticut. Prof McBrearty arrived in the UAE a year later and, during four weeks between Dec 1990 and Jan 1991, found ancient stone tools, made from chert, a hard sedimentary rock, and silica-impregnated limestone, at four sites in the area.

Three of the sites she classified as Neolithic, or New Stone Age, a time when people already hunted in groups and had advanced stone tools.

One of the sites, however, situated on Jebel Barakah, had its origins in the even more distant past. Tools found there appeared to belong to the Paleolithic period, also known as the Old Stone Age. It was a significant find; this process, which began more than two million years ago, marked the beginning of modern human behaviour.

Although at the time it was hard to date Prof McBrearty’s finds, it was clear she had discovered the earliest signs of human life in the UAE. “At the time,” she says, “it was not really high profile.”

However, subsequently the discovery has been recognised internationally as a Middle Paleolithic site and, more than a decade later, Abu Dhabi-based teams have resumed the search for traces of the UAE’s earliest inhabitants. The date of Prof McBrearty’s discoveries is, as she says, “still up in the air”, but new finds in 2007 and 2008 are helping to put her work more into context and suggest that the first human activity in the UAE may date back to between 80,000 and 130,000 years ago.

Not much is known about the people who lived in the UAE then, including how they reached the Arabian Peninsula and whether they are the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of the region. What is clear is that in some way the peninsula had a part to play as early humans spread out of Africa.

While the people of the Old Stone Age remain obscure, a lot more is known about the culture of populations in the New Stone Age. In Abu Dhabi, the best-preserved Neolithic site is on the island of Marawah, which, because of its environmental and cultural significance, has been given the status of a marine biosphere reserve by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).

Surveys on the island began in 1992. Marawah houses a number of sites. Perhaps the most important among them is known to scientists as MR-11. It is the place where the 7,500-year-old human remains, the oldest in Abu Dhabi, were found.

Dr Beech, who led the team that made the discovery, said that they were at first thought to belong to one person. Recent studies, however, have shown that the bones belonged to five different individuals.

This, says Dr Beech, has led the team to change its initial assessment of the site. While it was first thought that the ancient stone structure within which the remains had been found was a house, it is now thought to have been a tomb.

Only one of the chambers, of approximately eight square metres, has been excavated, and Dr Beech believes this represents only five per cent of the area that needs to be studied.

“We have so many questions now, after doing our initial excavations,” he says. “It is clearly a very important site. There is no parallel site of the same date in Arabia.”

While the find has posed many questions to be answered by subsequent expeditions, it has also answered others.

A lot, says Dr Beech, is revealed by the way the structure was built and located on the island – on a prominent mound, visible from all points of the surrounding sea, and with walls 40cm thick, constructed with two layers to create a cavity insulation effect. The structures, which must have been between 1.5 and two metres tall, covered by a dome, “must have looked quite remarkable”.

Burial places were also used as visual markers in the Jebel Hafit cairn tombs in Al Ain, as well as in sites in Ras al Khaimah, where tombs were built near important resources such as springs and wells and at high points, visible from afar.

The tombs probably marked tribal areas and show that as early as the Neolithic epoch people were using architecture as a way to express cultural identity, power and prestige.

Contemporary with the Marawah tomb is a site at Jebel Buhais in Sharjah, where a cemetery with more than 700 skeletons was discovered by a team led by Prof Hans-Peter Uerpman, and the work of the two teams of scientists is unravelling fascinating details about the Neolithic people who once lived here.

Sometimes, the smallest details of human existence paint the biggest pictures of the past.

The discovery of two pearl buttons on Marawah shows that oysters were a resource exploited by people here as long ago as 7,000 years, while bone finds at Jebel Buhais show that wild camel, ass and oryx were parts of the diet, as were marine creatures such as the now-protected dugong and sea turtles.

The discovery of burnt date pits at a site on Dalma Island confirms how deep-rooted is the date-palm tradition.

There was, however, no agriculture at the time and people had to travel with the seasons, moving between the coastline and the interior in search of food.

They would fish in winter and spring, when marine resources were the most abundant, harvest dates in June and dive for oysters in July and August.

“They were pastoral nomads,” says Dr Beech. “You can almost say, these were the proto-Bedouins of Arabia ... This kind of nomadic cycle has a deep root in prehistory.”

Such knowledge takes time to amass. “Often the job of an archaeologist is a long and patient one,” says Dr Beech. “Excavation work is only the beginning in telling the whole story.”

Unearthing the full tale of the UAE’s ancient past “is a patient detective story, but not exactly Sherlock Holmes ... It takes a lot longer to unravel the past.”

vtodorova@thenational.ae