When the first anatomically modern Homo sapiens spread out of Africa and into the Arabian Peninsula, the region’s seas were lower and its hills greener. Stone tools discovered recently in Oman have pushed back the date of that crucial first step by some 40 millenniums or more: to 106,000 years ago. Whether these earliest of wanderers died out in one of our species’ many failed expansions or went on to populate the Earth (as asserted by “Out of Arabia” theorists) remains an open question.
What is undeniable was their necessity of lugging water.
The weight of water is a sensory experience that the bulk of modern humanity has forgotten. (The strange new popularity of toting around a few mouthfuls of bottled water does not count.) Water is heavy: nine pounds per gallon. To carry a sufficient supply of this vital substance along wild coasts or miles inland in pursuit of herds of game requires strength and ingenuity. What did the first human ramblers use as containers? Nobody knows. Canteens, buckets, jugs—such tools were made of perishable materials. But the butchery of prey may have sparked an innovation that endures to this day among Saudi Arabia’s remnant pastoralists: a gurba—a goatskin water bladder.
Awad Omran, my Sudanese camel handler, has adapted the age-old challenge of conquering thirst to a contemporary world. He has built for our little caravan a water-cooling thermos made entirely from found materials—piles of junk discarded around a farm in Umlajj.
Awad’s water refrigerator operates on the simple principle of evaporation. Wetted and hung on a camel saddle, its dampened cardboard insulation cools our cupfuls of drinking water by several degrees. We refill it constantly. It is the water we always reach for. The jug took 20 minutes to build. A cheap cell phone playing exhortatory Sudanese ballads while working is optional.
