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Abstract

Between the Levant and the Indian sub-continent only a few Acheulean sites have been documented, hampering
models of hominin dispersals. Here we describe the first Acheulean sites to be discovered in the Nefud Desert of
northern Arabia. The four sites occur in a variety of settings including adjacent to an alluvial fan drainage system,
at a knappable stone source, and on the margins of endorheic basins. We discuss the implications of the sites for
hominin landscape use, in particular the preferential transport and curation of bifaces to fresh water sources. The
bifaces correspond to the Large Flake middle Acheulean in the Levantine sequence. The sites occupy a gap in the
distribution of the Acheulean across the Saharo-Arabian arid belt, and as such have implications for disin the
distribution of the Acheulean across the Saharo-Arabian arid belt, and as such have implications for dispersal routes between Africa and Asia.