We know a good deal about how early hominins — the branch of our evolutionary tree that split from chimps and bonobos up to seven million years ago — moved around their place of origin in eastern Africa. Fossils indicate they eventually made it to Eurasia through the Levant area of western Asia. This luscious green region, located on the easternmost edges of the Mediterranean, served our ancestors as the highway between two continents, one they would cross many times — in both directions. Given how the Arabian Peninsula, a landmass that encapsulates the Levant, was our ancestors’ one and only access point to the wider world, one would think evidence of their presence would stretch from Israel to Yemen. However, this is not the case. While the Levant is littered with prodigious digging sites, the paleontological and paleoenvironmental records of the peninsula’s interior have remained hauntingly empty and fragmented. That is, until today.…