2023-05-24 11:15:05
South Africa’s Stone Age archaeological heritage has been the subject of much revealing research, focusing primarily on the existence of several notable coastal caves and rock shelters. However, the presence of prehistoric humans in the vast regions of the interior of the country, as well as the resources available to them there and then, have until now been a rather enigmatic question.
It is known that people lived in these regions during various times of the last ice age, as demonstrated by the archaeological evidence scattered in those areas. However, seeing how desolate the desert landscape of these places is today, it is clear that those prehistoric humans could not have survived if the conditions prevailing in their time had been the same as those of today. By force, there had to be a sufficient availability of water, surely in the form of lakes.
In a new study, an international team consisting of, among others, Andrew Carr of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, Brian Chase of the University of Montpellier in France, and Brian A. Stewart of the University of Michigan in The United States has searched for and analyzed evidence of the past existence of such lakes in those areas.
The results of the study confirm that those desert regions of South Africa were home to lakes in the past. This, in turn, supports the suspicion that Stone Age humans resided in many more places in Africa than has been previously believed.
Brian Stewart examining the terrain in one of the investigated areas. (Photo: Brian Chase)
At various points in the now-desert interior of South Africa, such ghost lakes were very real during notable periods of the last ice age, notably between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago, and again around 31,000 years ago. In addition, the study authors have been able to determine, using digital models, how much water was needed to fill these paleolakes, what climatic conditions had to occur to create the lakes, and what were the effects of these lakes on hydrology, flora, and conservation. fauna of the region.
Their findings draw a fertile region with great biodiversity that must have been capable of providing sustenance for the hunter-gatherer communities of those times and places.
“This is currently the best evidence for when these lakes existed,” Carr notes. Climatically and archeologically that region has been a blank on the map, until now.
The study is entitled “Paleolakes and socioecological implications of last glacial ‘greening’ of the South African interior”. And it has been published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). (Fountain: NCYT de Amazings)
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