However, if it is accepted that early Homo did reach north Africa across the Sahara, the
Bab el-Mandab is not a requirement to explain human expansion into Asia and the Arabian
peninsula, only a possibility.
Research is under way to examine the Red Sea area for early settlement and movement.
A preliminary note (Flemming et al., 2003) argues that the Bab el-Mandab may have been
only 5 km wide at the glacial maxima and emphasises the prehistoric evidence in the
Arabian peninsula. However, access to the Arabian peninsula via Sinai is no harder than to
the Caucasus and other occupied regions. There is no cultural, fossil hominin, ecological
or chronological evidence at present that precludes the human settlement of the Arabian
peninsula entirely via the land routes to the north.
Only with the later expansion of modern H. sapiens ca. 60 kya does a water crossing of
the Red Sea fit more closely with the necessities of the genetic and archaeological evidence
(Forster and Matsumura, 2005) and this cultural capacity is seen as part of the same cycle
with the first settlement of Australia and New Guinea before ca. 40 kya.
Into Sinai
The only land route out of Africa is into Sinai and, more important, this has been the only
land route throughout the Pliocene and Pleistocene.