Mapping the Socotran caves again... after a small pause...

 After (a small pause of) 20 years, some of the cave maps are finally getting finished! All SKP-members have been active elsewhere, but thanks to Jos Beyens (final topo editor) and his discussions with Michael Laumanns (series editor of the Berliner Hohlenkundliche Berichte - BHB) all will be updated and published in 2026. As a reminder, our previous results can be found in Band 20 (2006).

Thanks to Jos Beyens, Rudi Debbaut, Karl Willems and all other SKP-members for these efforts and final wrap of exploration fun...

Meanwhile a Czech caving team is actively exploring on the island, with which we will start collaborating closely. Previous cave photographers are sharping their... images and the GPS-expert is uploading all exploration tracks.

In summary, all ingredients for a final book describing 20-30 years of exploration and research are piling up, the challenge in mine, Inshallah...

Peter   

The Decipherment of the Dhofari Script – Three halḥam abecedaries and the first glimpses into the corpus

Once in a while, here after a century of research, Prof. Dr. Ahmad Al-Jallad, a Jordanian-American philologist, epigraphist, and a historian of language might be on a break to decipher some enigmatic ancient South-Arabic scripts. 

Exciting stuff, as this ancient pre-Islamic language indigenous to South Arabia, also occurs on Socotra Island. While the experts are working on it right now, it might soon open the door towards a new fascinating chapter in the cultural history of Arabia.

Al-Jallad concluded the script most likely descended from a script called Thamudic B. That script was widely used on the northern side of the Arabian Peninsula, in what is today the Saudi Arabian province of Najd.

A nice summary can be found here: https://www.science.org/content/article/mysterious-pre-islamic-script-oman-finally-deciphered

The article itself is available here: https://www.academia.edu/129778573/Al_Jallad_2025_The_Decipherment_of_the_Dhofari_Script_Three_hal%E1%B8%A5am_abecedaries_and_the_first_glimpses_into_the_corpus

Picture website IASA

Thanks!

Caves, the next frontier...

 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02302-y

After years of exploring cave systems and tafoni's on the island, we discovered quite some burial sites on the island. Questions popped-up: Who were these people? How old are the remains? Are these families/tribes? Where do the Soqotri people came from anyway? 

Finally some information got extracted from these remains, freshly published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, titled: 

Medieval DNA from Soqotra points to Eurasian origins of an isolated population at the crossroads of Africa and Arabia

Holocene vertebrate assemblages provide the first evidence for the presence of the barn owl (Tytonidae, Tyto alba) on Socotra Island (Yemen)

Another cave-derived result shows the presence of the barn owl (Tyto albo) once flying around on the island! The article in Geobios clarifies Hope carbon dating can shed more light on the exact period?

Lot's of caves, lot's of faunal remains, lot's of work...

Congrats to the Italian team!

 

__PRESENT__PRESENT__PRESENT

Global Forum combined with Water and Humanity Conference (Muscat October 2022)

It was an honor to contribute to the Global Forum combined with the Water and Humanity Conference in Muscat!

'Well of Hell': Omani cave team discover what lurks in Yemen’s strange sinkhole

 'Well of Hell': Omani cave team discover what lurks in Yemen’s strange sinkhole

Finally the Omani caves exploration team (OCET) explored the Well of Barhout located in Yemen's eastern province of Al-Mahra. 

The National News

So much more to explore on the Yemeni mainland...