The fascinating (and dangerous) places scientists aren't exploring

Our team at the Socotra Archipelago Project details the current environmental crisis on Socotra, and what's at stake.

Another piece by our team, this time covering details of our scouting expedition and, specifically, my own archaeological interests on the island and its historic cave dwellers.

The Socotra Archipelago is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. See its UNESCO page for facts, figures and documents.

Sobering facts, figures and news on the dire humanitarian disaster in Yemen.

For more on my general work in Yemen, how it was impacted by the beginning of the war and the impact of the war in general, see my early TEDxNashville Talk.

This now outdated and out-of-print book is a must-read for those not only interested in the Shanidar Neanderthals, but also in the process and even adventure of palaeoanthropological discovery. Interestingly, Ralph Solecki ended up in Iraq only because he couldn't get into Yemen, his originally intended location for surveying. This book brilliantly and engagingly details how he went about prospecting for early human sites, how he came to suspect the Shanidar cave's potential and his many discoveries therein. It also includes fascinating details such as the fact that families of local Iraqi Kurds were still living in the cave when they started excavating it, and their relationships and attitudes towards each other — and towards the dynamite the archaeological team was using! Shanidar became a very significant Neanderthal site because of the so-called "flower burial": the Neanderthal known as Shanidar IV was discovered in a location rich in flower pollen; it was therefore claimed that this Neanderthal was buried with flowers, meaning that they were involved in ritual and emotion which had hitherto been seen as exclusively a Homo sapiens trait. As Solecki writes: "With the finding of flowers in association with Neanderthals, we are brought suddenly to the realization that the universality of mankind and the love of beauty go beyond the boundary of our own species." This is a complicated and now very controversial claim, with others arguing that the pollen was introduced by rodents, as there are many burrows in the sediment. (Keep an eye on the on-going analyses of Professor Graeme Barker's team.)

Hard work in understudied locations can pay off, and pay off big. Not a single human fossil (Homo sapiens or otherwise) had been found in the whole of the Arabian Peninsula — many had argued that given its proximity to Africa, this was simply a result of bias (fewer teams working in the peninsula both at the time and historically). Then, in 2018, professor Michael Petraglia's team announced they had discovered not only the first human fossil of the Arabian Peninsula, but also, at the time of publication, the oldest directly dated Homo sapiens fossil found outside of Africa. Petraglia's "Green Arabia" team have worked in Saudi Arabia for a number of years and their results and discoveries never cease to fascinate, demonstrating that desert was once green (reminiscent of the east African savannas) and that species of Homo were living there possibly as early as 500,000 years ago.