Taken from the what you’ll learn in this article section at the top:

1. Fossilized footprints in Saudi Arabia show human traffic on the cusp of a subsequent ice age.
2. Like carbon dating, scientists use isotopes and context clues to calculate the approximate age of fossils.
3. These human prints were surrounded by animals but not hunted animals, indicating humans were just thirsty.

3. These human prints were surrounded by animals but not hunted animals, indicating humans were just thirsty.

Uh… Thirsty for what?

3. These human prints were surrounded by animals but not hunted animals, indicating humans were just thirsty.

Uh… Thirsty for what?

The linked Popular Mechanics article cites this Smithsonian article.

The Smithsonian article cites this National Geographic article and this Science Advances article (among others).

The National Geographic article is paywalled.

The Science Advances research article seems to be the original source—here’s the abstract:

The nature of human dispersals out of Africa has remained elusive because of the poor resolution of paleoecological data in direct association with remains of the earliest non-African people. Here, we report hominin and non-hominin mammalian tracks from an ancient lake deposit in the Arabian Peninsula, dated within the last interglacial. The findings, it is argued, likely represent the oldest securely dated evidence for Homo sapiens in Arabia. The paleoecological evidence indicates a well-watered semi-arid grassland setting during human movements into the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia. We conclude that visitation to the lake was transient, likely serving as a place to drink and to forage, and that late Pleistocene human and mammalian migrations and landscape use patterns in Arabia were inexorably linked.

On my lawn‽

The linked Popular Mechanics article cites this Smithsonian article.

The Smithsonian article cites this National Geographic article and this Science Advances article (among others).

The National Geographic article is paywalled.

The Science Advances research article seems to be the original source—here’s the abstract:

The nature of human dispersals out of Africa has remained elusive because of the poor resolution of paleoecological data in direct association with remains of the earliest non-African people. Here, we report hominin and non-hominin mammalian tracks from an ancient lake deposit in the Arabian Peninsula, dated within the last interglacial. The findings, it is argued, likely represent the oldest securely dated evidence for Homo sapiens in Arabia. The paleoecological evidence indicates a well-watered semi-arid grassland setting during human movements into the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia. We conclude that visitation to the lake was transient, likely serving as a place to drink and to forage, and that late Pleistocene human and mammalian migrations and landscape use patterns in Arabia were inexorably linked.

3. These human prints were surrounded by animals but not hunted animals, indicating humans were just thirsty.

Uh… Thirsty for what?

• Thirsty - feeling thirst
• Thirst - a sensation of dryness in the mouth and throat associated with a desire for liquids, also : the bodily condition (as of dehydration) that induces this sensation

Jokes aside, why does everybody feel the need to gravitate towards the least popular definition here?

Real estate?

gestures broadly at everything

Ceiling?

How does one get two upvotes and a heart on Lemmy? (Maybe it’s a Mander.xyz thing I never noticed before.)

It’s client dependent, but for that one the heart is the final karma score after downvotes and upvotes are calculated together