A lone finger bone unearthed in the desert suggests modern humans had penetrated deep into Arabia already 85,000 years ago, said a study Monday that claimed to advance our African exodus by millennia. The research, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, challenged a long-held consensus that humans started to move en masse from our birthplace in Africa only about 60,000 years ago, with a few small, unsuccessful migrations before. Recent archaeological finds have started to question that idea, with some claiming evidence of homo sapiens spreading beyond Africa and the adjacent Levant region already 120,000 years ago or more. However, many of those discoveries — including from China and Australia — have doubts hovering over their authenticity and dating, said the authors of Monday’s study.

In addition to focusing on the importance of Rubens within the history of the oil sketch and facilitating an appreciation of the unique qualities of his works of this type, the exhibition Rubens. Painter of Sketches presents the results of an exhaustive research project directed by the exhibition’s two curators: Friso Lammertse, curator of Old Master Painting at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, and Alejandro Vergara, chief curator of Flemish and Northern schools painting at the Museo del Prado. The conclusions of their study are presented in the exhibition and also form the basis of the accompanying publication. The practice of producing oil sketches within the process of creating a painting began in 16th-century Italy. Artists such as Polidoro da Caravaggio, Beccafumi, Federico Barrocci, Tintoretto and Veronese were the first to make use of painted oil sketches as vehicles to try out their ideas when devising a painting. Ho