Jabal Al Fayah
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How it came to be
The Faya Palaeolandscape is Jebel Faya, a limestone hill in inland Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, and its surroundings, between the Gulf coast and the Hajar Mountains. It preserves traces of people from the Middle Palaeolithic and Neolithic, between 210,000 and 6,000 years ago. Its layers show how hunter-gatherers and herders adapted to a climate that swung between arid and rainy phases about every 20,000 years.
The rock shelter FAY-NE1, at the northeastern end of the hill, was found and test-excavated in the 1980s by a French team directed by Rémy Boucharlat of the CNRS. From 2003 a joint project of the Sharjah archaeology authority and the University of Tübingen began large-scale excavation, and in 2006 it reached the first stratified Palaeolithic material. Digging went on until 2017; the terrace and the shelter together yielded more than 30,000 stone artefacts.
In 2011 a team led by Hans-Peter Uerpmann reported in Science that tools 100,000 to 125,000 years old resembled the technology of early humans in East Africa. The finding was taken as evidence that people reached Arabia directly from Africa at an early date. The site was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2025, and its finds are shown at the nearby Mleiha Archaeological Centre.
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