This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: An international research team led by Dr. Gabriele Russo of the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen has re-examined historical fossil collections from Lebanon using modern methodology.
The results, published today in two complementary studies in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, show that the Levant served as an important corridor for animals and various human lineages during the Pleistocene and that environmental conditions in the central part of the region differed significantly from those in the south. The finds from Ras el-Kelb, Naame and Nahr Ibrahim date back as far as 400,000 years and provide insights into the lives of early humans as well as the partly densely forested landscapes of that time. The studies also underscore the high scientific value of historical collections—especially in politically unstable regions.
For hundreds of thousands of years, the eastern edge of the Mediterranean region, known as the Levant, has connected Europe, Asia and Africa. It has been a venue for exchange between populations, cultures, regions and continents. "Research in the Levant continues to present unique challenges to this day due to political and social instability.
In the particular case of Lebanon, such instability continues to limit access to important fossil sites for extended periods of time. This makes historical collections all the more valuable," explains Russo, a researcher from the Paleoanthropology Work Group at the Institute of Archaeological Sciences and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen. "Even though some of the original excavations took place more than 100 years ago, modern methods allow us to extract new information from them to answer new scientific questions." The Levant is considered a major corridor for the dispersal of various animal species and hominin lineages during the Pleistocene, the period spanning from 2.58 million years to approximately 11,700 years ago.
This included migrations of Homo sapiens and possibly encounters with Neanderthals. "While the southern part of the region has been intensively studied for over a century, the central and northern areas have been explored to a much lesser extent. In present-day Lebanon, political instability since the 1970s has limited research there.
As a result, environmental conditions and archaeological developments from the southern Levant have sometimes been regarded as representative of the entire region," explains apl. Sireen El Zaatari of the Paleoanthropology research group at the University of Tübingen and last author of the study. The researchers' new study calls this assumption into question.
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