Abdullah Al-Sharekh, associate professor of archaeology at King Saud University, stressed the importance of the discovery of a site in Saudi Arabia’s Nefud desert that contains human footprints estimated to be 85,000 years old.

“The research will be published in one of the world’s leading scientific journals,” he said, adding that Prince Sultan is supporting the project.

“Athar is one of the oldest and rarest archaeological sites in the Arabian Peninsula,” he said. “It will introduce us to the various living resources that were available to humans, and will support previously found archaeological evidence about the presence of early human groups in the Arabian Peninsula and their dispersal to different geographic regions.”