Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [85]
Cross-section of Wadi Ghadun
What Juri had found was a sampling of Acheulean utensils that were 700,000 years (or more) old, the handiwork of long-vanished Homo erectus. Here was the beginning, Chapter One of the Ubar story. With skill, tenacity, and luck, Juri was subsequently able to detect the footsteps—all at or near Shisur—of man's journey from that time to the present.
For the better part of a million years our distant ancestor Homo erectus, upright but not very bright, roamed Arabia. Then, approximately one hundred thousand years ago, Homo erectus was displaced, as our direct ancestor, Homo sapiens, migrated out of Africa and across Arabia. It was not a difficult journey, for there was then a land bridge at the south end of the Red Sea, and Arabia at that time was verdant and welcoming. Every year life-giving monsoon rains swept across the peninsula. The rains gave birth to rivers and created a thousand or more lakes, home to water buffalo and hippopotamuses. (In the sands of ancient lakebeds geologists have found intact fossilized hippo teeth, so well preserved they could have been lost just yesterday.) Clouds of dark smoke rose from the shores of these lakes, from fires set by Homo sapiens to flush out wild cattle, goats, oryxes, gazelles, and possibly camels and hartebeests. The game was roasted at camps on ridges and hilltops all around Shisur. At these sites, early man had open-air workshops for manufacturing the huge blades he favored for his spears.1
But then, some twenty thousand years ago, the rains withdrew.2 The rivers and lakes of the Rub' al-Khali dried up, and violent winds tore at their sandy beds and reworked them into vast fields of dunes. The birds fled, leaving the sky to a merciless sun. Daily temperatures soared to over 130 degrees in the shade, if there was any shade. Early man cleared out, in all probability retreating to the north and the land of the Fertile Crescent.3
For the next hundred centuries there was no appreciable rainfall, and in the whole peninsula not a trace of human occupation. All that survived, in isolated pockets, were highly drought-tolerant animals and plants, among them a small, scraggly tree that favored a harsh limestone substrate and warded off other vegetation with toxic terpenes spread from its roots: the frankincense tree.
About eight to ten thousand years ago the rains returned to Arabia, and wanderers from the north appeared on the peninsula's empty stage. They came from what has been called the "proto-Semitic homeland," an arc stretching from northern Egypt up into Syria. In an amazingly short time—as little as two hundred years—they repopulated all of Arabia. The pride and sustenance of these people was their cattle; their progress through the peninsula is marked by images of cattle they pecked on blackened rocks. At their campsites, these new pastoral nomads gazed skyward and imagined the stars as the cattle of the moon, penned only by the far horizons.
By the time they reached the Dhofar Mountains (the only place in Arabia where a cattle culture still survives), a group of these wanderers had most likely achieved a tribal identity, an identity that would become the People of'Ad. They settled down and enjoyed the favors of a land that every year was becoming greener and more bountiful. The monsoon rains spilled over the mountains and watered the land beyond. The desert bloomed, soaked up the rains, and issued them forth as springs. Bubbling up through an ancient cavern, one spring would someday be called Shisur, the spring of "the cleft."
The early People of'Ad camped near the spring but probably not at it; because animals came to drink there, Shisur was an ideal place to trap game. Shisur's Neolithic game trap was cleverly laid out.
Neolithic animal trap at Shisur
When gazelles and oryxes came to drink, beaters would approach from the east and noisily drive them between two rock walls to the west of the spring. The narrowing walls forced the panicked, confused animals into a rock circle. There, waiting hunters would