ABU DHABI - Remains of the earliest-known inhabitant of Abu Dhabi have been found on the western island of Marawah by the Abu Dhabi Islands>

The excavations were carried out at the site of a 7,000 year old village which has the best-preserved and most-sophisticated stone buildings of Neolithic date that are known anywhere in Eastern Arabia. Radiocarbon dates from the building, analysed last year, suggests that the upper layers inside date to between 6,500 to 7.000 years ago, indicating that the original construction may have been earlier.

The work on the site,focused on the detailed excavation of a building that was first identified during earlier.
This building was built in at least three phases, and contains at least four rooms, one of which has now been completely excavated.
Around 4.6 metres long and 1.8 metres wide, the room had well-built walls that were constructed using a double-skin method, large stones first being placed as inner and outer layers, and smaller stones then being used to fill the cavity. Although known from the Bronze Age, which began a couple of thousand years later, this method had not previously been identified on Neolithic sites in Eastern Arabia.
Adjacent are at least three more rooms, yet to be fully examined.

The human skeleton, whose sex is yet to be determined, was laid on a stone platform that had been built just inside the room, next to the southern doorway. This indicates that it must have been placed there after the original domestic use of the building had ended, since anyone entering from the room to the south would have trod on it.

Close by were fragments of a decorated pot, of which sufficient remained for the team to reconstruct its complete shape.
It resembles pottery from the Neolithic Ubaid civilisation in southern Mesopotamia, but the decorations are of a type not previously found in Eastern Arabia.
The pot, which is the most complete of its type and age ever found, is also probably 6,500-7,000 years old, and provides evidence that the Neolithic inhabitants of Marawah were trading by sea with southern Mesopotamia.

Also found during the excavation were fragments of plaster vessels, some of which were painted.

Such vessels have also been discovered on another Neolithic site on Dalma, but are otherwise unknown anywhere else in the Arabian Gulf.