How did Homo Sapiens get out of Africa?

Homo sapiens evolved in Africa between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago, leaving the continent via many routes. However, it has long been thought that they used a southern crossing across the Red Sea from the Horn of Africa to reach southwestern Arabia. A new study suggests another route from the North.

The researchers conducted their study in Arabia and found loaded tools of various types on the route, which suggests that the route chosen by prehistoric travellers, now deserted, ran through the Middle East into western Asia and northern Arabia via the Jordan.

“ T he transit route through the Northern Corridor from the Sinai Peninsula to the Levant and Arabia was considered an optimal route since it was the only land route out of Africa. Dated fossils and archaeological evidence strongly support the use of this corridor,” the study states.

Tools dating back 84,000 years

The researchers say it was a “well-watered corridor” that allowed travelers to use it as a base for resting and hunting for food. “The presence of water could have allowed modern humans to migrate through a green corridor from Africa to Arabia and beyond,” the study says.

“Although previous studies have looked for large lakes as potential watering holes, in reality small wetlands were very important as stopping points during migration,” said Paul Carling, professor of geomorphology at the University of Southampton and co-author of the study .

To conduct research on hand tools discovered in the Jordan Rift Valley, the team used luminescence dating techniques to find out what period the tools belonged to and how long they had been buried. This method estimates how much time has passed since the sediments were last exposed to light, the press release said. This paleoclimate data is an essential part of understanding how climate change played a role in promoting the immigration of ancient human populations.

A lush corridor out of Africa

The results indicated that the tools were used around 84,000 years ago. “Paleohydrological evidence from the Jordan Desert improves our understanding of the environmental context at that time. Rather than a barren desert, savanna grasslands would have provided much-needed resources for humans to survive during their journey out of Africa to southwestern Asia and beyond,” said Dr. Mahmoud Abbas, lead author of the study from Shantou University, China.

The study drew on connections between climatic, chronological and archaeological data from the Levant and Arabia for its research.

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The article How did Homo Sapiens get out of Africa? comes from Economic Scenarios .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/come-fece-lhomo-sapiens-ad-uscire-dallafrica/ on Thu, 05 Oct 2023 05:30:54 +0000.