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Everything to know about Sharjah's Faya Palaeolandscape, newly added to UNESCO's World Heritage List

The United Arab Emirates is abuzz with a brand new milestone – a new entrant into UNESCO's World Heritage List: Sharjah's Faya Palaeolandscape, a site hiding mysteries from 200,000 years ago. Announced during the 47th annual session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, this desert site has been inscribed in the list for its Outstanding Universal Value (OUV), displaying some of the earliest records of human presence in the arid desert environments. Faya Palaeolandscape is located in the central region of Sharjah, presenting as a spectacular, rolling desert landscape, and the first desert Paleolithic site to cement a place on the World Heritage List. Faya was the only nomination from the Arab region this year, a historic moment for not just the UAE but for the wider community, and marks the second site in the UAE to be included in the list; the first were the Cultural Sites of Al Ain, which were inscribed in 2011. The history What's incredible about Faya is not just the sheer scale of the history it represents, but also the state in which the tangible remains were unearthed – well-preserved, and ready to tell stories about what life in the region looked like thousands of years ago. The site is located between the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea and preserves evidence of human life and occupation from the Middle Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods (210,000–6,000 years ago). The layers of archaeological finds – 18 to be exact- reveal how hunter-gatherers and pastoralists adapted to the extreme cyclic climate of the region, alternating between arid and rainy periods every 20,000 years, as is the natural course of the Earth's climate cycle. That's why we have contrasting periods like the sweltering era of the dinosaurs and the Ice Age. Beyond subsistence activities, the earliest groups of humans made use of the site's geomorphological features for extraction of resources. The site provides evidence of diverse water sources of presence of raw materials, and is a testament to the power of human resilience in the face of hyper-arid environments. Why is Faya important? The discovery and recognition of such a site points a new direction for the global perception of prehistoric existence in the Arabian Peninsula, as well as it's role in charting the journey of the earliest man out of Africa. It proves to be a significant regional contribution in what the world knows about its own history, and revealing something unique about the desert – once viewed simply as migratory corridors, areas of constant movement, Faya has been identified as site for repeated human settlement. The future of Faya Over the past three decades, the Sharjah Archaeology Authority has been conducting excavations on the site, in collaboration with leading international institutions such as the University of Tübingen and Oxford Brookes University. Now, looking to the future, the UAE and Sharjah have unveiled a 2024–2030 management and conservation plan for the site, aiming to preserve Faya's Outstanding Universal Value while keeping the curiosity alive with continued research, community engagement, and sustainable tourism. Faya also holds a long-standing place in UNESCO's Human Evolution, Adaptations, Dispersals and Social Developments (HEADS) Programme, alongside internationally significant sites like the Klasies River Caves in South Africa. @jebelfaya Images: UNESCO World Heritage > Sign up for FREE to get exclusive updates that you are interested in