ENHG family field trip to the Mleiha Archeological Centre
Our family camping weekend on the 20 and 21st of October was really four trips in one, combining appreciation of our desert habitat with archaeology, geology and star gazing. Archaelogy The Mleiha Archaeological Centre is a museum located next to a restored Umm Al-Nar tomb, with many other sites at various distances from the centre. The museum itself explains the importance of the sites around Mleiha in the context of the region’s history and development. Of special note are the paleolithic hand axes excavated at Faya in 2010 that have been dated reliably to over 120,000 years old. The museum contains a hologram of one of these hand axes, designed to show that these Faya tools are closer to the contemporaneous East African handiwork of Homo Sapiens than to Neanderthal tools from sites in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Since no Homo Sapiens fossils older than 50,000 years ago have been iden...