Humans migrating from Africa to Arabia some 5,000 years ago may have traveled along a now-submerged Red Sea coastline, and despite the desert conditions, lived well off marine mollusks. It had been previously thought that drought conditions would have slowed down or stopped hunter-gatherers from moving through this region.
But researchers found millions of marine shells at Saudi Arabia’s Farasan Islands, and calculations suggest that Conomurex fasciatus (lined conchs) were plentiful and gathered year-round by prehistoric fishers, meaning they had a stable source of food despite the drought.
