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    • Acknowledgements

    We thank HRH Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, President of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (SCTH), and A. Ghabban, Vice President of the SCTH for permission to carry out this study. Z. Nawab, President of the Saudi Geological Survey, provided research support and logistics. Fieldwork and analyses were funded by the European Research Council (no. 295719, to M.D.P. and 617627, to J.T.S.), the SCTH, the British Academy (H.S.G. and E.M.L.S.), The Leverhulme Trust, the Australian Research Council (DP110101415 to R.G., ARC Future Fellowship Grant FT150100215 to M.D., and FT160100450 to J.L.), European Union Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship (PIOF-GA-2013-626474, to M.D.), and the Research Council of Norway (SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour, 262618). We thank P. Cuthbertson, K. Janulis, M. Bernal, S. Al-Soubhi, M. Haptari, A. Matari and Y. Al-Mufarreh for assistance in the field. We thank I. Cartwright (Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford) for the photographs of AW-1 (Fig. 2a), I. Matthews (RHUL) for producing the Bayesian age model and M. O’Reilly (MPI-SHH) for assistance with the preparation of figures. We acknowledge the Max Planck Society for supporting us with comparative fossil data, and we thank curators for access to comparative extant and fossil material in their care (Supplementary Tables 5 and 7). Maps were created using ArcGIS software by Esri.

    Author information

    Affiliations

    1. School of Archaeology, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

      • Huw S. Groucutt
      •  & Eleanor L. M. Scerri

    2. Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany

      • Huw S. Groucutt
      • , Nick A. Drake
      • , Eleanor L. M. Scerri
      •  & Michael D. Petraglia

    3. Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), Environmental Futures Research Institute, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

      • Rainer Grün
      • , Julien Louys
      •  & Mathieu Duval

    4. Research School of Earth Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

      • Rainer Grün
      •  & Leslie Kinsley

    5. Saudi Geological Survey, Sedimentary Rocks and Palaeontology Department, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

      • Iyad A. S. Zalmout
      • , Abdullah M. Memesh
      • , Ammar J. Abdulshakoor
      • , Abdu M. Al-Masari
      •  & Ahmed A. Bahameem

    6. Department of Geography, King’s College London, London, UK

      • Nick A. Drake
      •  & Paul S. Breeze

    7. Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK

      • Simon J. Armitage
      • , Ian Candy
      •  & Richard Clark-Wilson

    8. SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE), University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

      • Simon J. Armitage

    9. Geochronology, Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución (CENIEH), Burgos, Spain

      • Mathieu Duval

    10. PAVE Research Group, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

      • Laura T. Buck
      • , Emma Pomeroy
      •  & Jay T. Stock

    11. Earth Sciences Department, Natural History Museum, London, UK

      • Laura T. Buck

    12. Skeletal Biology Research Centre, School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

      • Tracy L. Kivell

    13. Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

      • Tracy L. Kivell
      •  & Nicholas B. Stephens

    14. School of Natural Sciences and Psychology, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK

      • Emma Pomeroy

    15. Department of Anthropology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

      • Jay T. Stock

    16. Palaeontology, Geobiology and Earth Archives Research Centre, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Science, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

      • Mathew Stewart

    17. School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia

      • Gilbert J. Price

    18. Department of Life Sciences, Natural History Museum, London, UK

      • Wing Wai Sung

    19. Department of Archaeology, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

      • Abdullah Alsharekh

    20. Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

      • Abdulaziz Al-Omari
      • , Khaled M. S. Al Murayyi
      •  & Badr Zahrani

    21. Department of Archaeology, Hazara University, Mansehra, Pakistan

      • Muhammad Zahir

    22. Human Origins Program, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, USA

      • Michael D. Petraglia

    Contributions

    H.S.G. and M.D.P. designed, coordinated and supervised the study. H.S.G., I.S.A.Z., N.A.D., S.J.A., I.C., R.C.-W., J.L., P.S.B., M.S., G.J.P., A.A., A.A.-O., M.Z., A.M.M, K.S.M.A, B.Z, E.M.L.S and M.D.P conducted excavation, survey and multidisciplinary sampling at Al Wusta. L.T.B., T.L.K., E.P., N.B.S. and J.T.S. conducted the morphological analysis and comparative study of the AW-1 phalanx. R.G., M.D. and L.K. carried out the U-series and ESR analyses. S.J.A. and R.C.-W carried out the OSL dating. I.C. and R.C.-W conducted the stratigraphic and sedimentological analysis of the site, with input from N.A.D., J.L. and G.J.P. W.W.S. analysed the diatoms. M.S. and J.L. analysed the vertebrate fossils, with input from G.J.P. Lithic analysis was conducted by H.S.G. and E.M.L.S. Spatial analyses were conducted by P.S.B. All authors helped to write the paper.

    Competing interests

    The authors declare no competing interests.

    Corresponding authors

    Correspondence to Huw S. Groucutt or Michael D. Petraglia.