Dr. Mark Beech's Top 10 Archaeology Discoveries in the UAE: Part 1

At the end of our season last year, we had the pleasure of a lecture from Dr. Mark Beech, on the UAE's most prominent archaeologists, who gave us an overview of his top 10 discoveries during his time as a paleo-archaeologist in the UAE, from 1994, when he first fell in love with the country, to the present day.

Dr. Beech is of course well known as a member of the team that discovered the Sir Bani Yas church and monastery complex, which now numbers 40 sites, among them courtyard houses, a monastery and villas. (Incidentally, the site was first discovered by an ENHG member, Caroline Layman, who found plaster in a llama pen on the island during a joint ENHG-DNHG field trip!)

However, many of us are not aware of Dr. Beech’s ground-breaking discoveries in paleo-archaeology, which put the UAE on the map for some very significant finds. In this post, then, we will look at numbers 6-10 on his list of top 10 discoveries. We guarantee you’ll learn something you didn’t know before…

Ruwais

Many of the finds in the UAE are discovered through oil surveys, and the Ruwais site is no exception. This site in the Western Region is rich with more mammalian fossils than any other site in the Arabian Peninsula, with the first discoveries in 2002.

Artist rendering by Gemma Goodall, found here. 

During the Late Miocene, around 68 million years ago, Abu Dhabi was a little different! The Western Region was covered in trees, with slow-moving, large rivers flowing through it, much like East Africa today. Through this verdant paradise stomped a four-tusked elephant almost 3 metres high at the shoulder...

Dr. Beech was part of a team that excavated and transported a tusk of this gigantic creature, perfectly intact and measuring 2.54 metres long. It had to be encased in a specially-designed crate for transfer to the Environment Agency, where the team promptly named their species Stegotetrabelodon Emiratus.

Photo of tusk excavation, from ADIAS

Umm Al Ashtan

Not far away from the Ruwais site were found an intact pelvis, femur and tibia of the mighty stegotetrabelodon in the remains of an ancient forest with 15-metre tree roots and gigantic trunks. This permitted the ADIAS team to gather an even clearer picture of what the creature looked like.

Drawing from here

Mleisa Site 1

However, it was a tip-off from an Emirati man living in the area that alerted the team to an elephant trackway of the late Miocene period. He called them ‘dinosaur prints,’ but they were in fact the earliest evidence of herding behaviour for elephants, showing separate tracks for bulls and mother-child groups, which brought the discovery to international prominence. 

Photo from 'Fossils of Arabia' blog, here.

These patterns could be clearly seen in aerial panoramic photographs, which the team painstakingly assembled by kite in those pre-drone days.

Photo credit: Nathan Craig, found here

 Shuwaihat

Another site dating to the Late Miocene, the Shuwaihat site abounds in everything from elephants to tiny fossils. The team found teeth from cane rats, which still exists in West Africa, and which Dr. Beech calls a ‘guinea pig on steroids,’ as well as a protohummus dango, so called by the team because its teeth look like squashed chickpeas (hummus is Arabic for chickpea). They also found teeth from a guenon monkey, the first such find outside of Africa, and a small, squirrel-like animal that is still being identified.

The rat tooth is the brown, pebble-like object in the middle. It was found by sifting through tonnes of sand to find tiny animal remains. 

Both photos from the 'Fossils of Arabia' blog, here. 

Jebel Barakah

This is where Dr. Beech’s discoveries begin to abut on human history, in the Middle Paelolithic, a mere 150,000-35,000 years ago, or ‘two weeks’ in paleological time, as he said. Returning to a site previously excavated by Sally McBrearty in 1991, the team found more clusters of sites where stone tools made with the Paleolithic Levallois technology were used, and where Neanderthal and homeo Sapiens mingled.

Drawing from the Environmental Atlas of Abu Dhabi Emirate, here. 

There was no Arabian Gulf at the time. Instead, an ancient river emptied into the Gulf Basin, and groups of nomadic hunters would hunt and slaughter the animals that gathered around ancient lakes in the area, using stones gathered from the top of the mountain. These finds, along with tools found in Saudi Arabia, support the Out of Africa theory, with ancient nomads wandering along the Southern coast and crossing the Bab Al Mandeb into what is now Yemen.

We will detail Dr. Beech’s top 5 sites in another post which will take us into early human settlements in the UAE, but in the meantime, let us enjoy the idea of Abu Dhabi as a lush riverland crossed by giant, four-tusked proto-elephants!