BRUSSELS, BELGIUM—More than 800 Paleolithic artifacts have been recovered from a dried lake bed in Iraq’s Western Desert by researchers from the Free University of Brussels, according to a Cosmos Magazine report. The artifacts include Early Paleolithic hand axes estimated to be 1.5 million years old, and flakes of stone left behind by toolmakers during the Middle Paleolithic, between 250,000 and 400,000 years ago. Team leader Ella Egberts said that it is not clear which hominin made the tools, since few fossils have been preserved on the Arabian Peninsula, but the researchers plan to continue their investigation of possible early human species who inhabited the region. “I hope to reconstruct Pleistocene environmental changes and early human presence and behavior in the Western Desert,” Egberts said. To read about a depiction of a Paleolithic hand ax in a fifteenth-century painting, go to "Portrait of an Ancient Ax."
