Commercial radiocarbon dating
At Umm Al Quwain an interesting site was discovered and partly excavated on the island of Akab, opposite the building of the Diwan.
This site yielded a large quantity of dugong (sea cow) bones that lead the excavators to interpret the site as being a butchery site for this marine animal.
These are located along the coastline which extends for about 600 kilometers between Ras Al Khaimah and Sila.
Mounds like these, though on a smaller scale, are also known along the UAE stretch of coastline on the Gulf of Oman, e.g. Other Neolithic sites on the Arabian Gulf coastline include Hamriyah in Sharjah and Al Medar in Umm Al Quwain.
This date, as well as other archaeological finds from the site including a remarkably complete Ubaid pottery vessel, indicates that the Emirates have at least seven thousand five hundred years of history.
On the islands and close to the coasts they were largely fishermen and hunters, only small scale husbandry being carried out, whereas inland they mostly practiced a nomadic lifestyle with their domestic herds.
The remains left behind of these communities, which lived on some of the islands of Abu Dhabi as well as in the interior oases, are stone tools dominated by arrowheads, scrapers, knives and borers.
Houses like these were still in use some decades ago.
Discoveries made at Dalma include stone arte- facts and beads in addition to fragments of Ubaid pottery imported from Mesopotamia some seven thousand years ago.