Anthropologists have never doubted that the first humans appeared in Africa and then settled on other continents. But how? Found that dried up ancient river, now hidden beneath the sands of the Sahara, once served as a corridor through which the representatives of Homo sapiens migrated from their places of permanent residence in the heart of the Black Continent.
Re-creating the climate that prevailed on Earth about a hundred thousand years ago, scientists assumed that prehistoric people left the area of their former habitat, taking advantage of an extensive network of fertile rivers, which brought them out of the area lying south of the Sahara, to the shores of the Mediterranean.
For decades, scientists minds discuss the hypothesis that the three North African now dried up rivers were the roads on which the prehistoric human ancestors left their usual habitat. Moving along the river banks, replete with numerous flora and fauna, able to feed them, the ancient people could easily make a grand shift and leave Africa to move to another continent. Finally, the published results of the first scientific work in which the simulated volume and number of the then existing during the rivers of water. The latter fact is important for the nutrition of relatively large masses of migrating hominids.
In the period from 130 to 120 thousand years ago, the Sahara desert, seems to have been a flowering paradise. Huge lakes, seasonal rivers and vast savannas, which roam elephants and giraffes - no one expects to see this today in the Sahara. However, many indications that this is no time to look this desert - so put it at the presentation of the study British woman scientist Anne Osborne (Anne Osborne).
However, it was not known how much water was in these rivers, where and in what direction they were spent, and how far do they go to the desert, - marks on the pages of the Internet publication NewScientist British hydrologist Tom Coulthard (Tom Coulthard), who along with his colleagues modeled the climate of the last interglacial period, about 100-130 thousand years ago. It turned out that the monsoon rains brought the water ran down the northern slopes of the mountains south of the Sahara, filled the routes running through the desert riverbeds in fairly large numbers, despite the abundant absorption into the soil and evaporation.
In addition to the rivers, the new model paleogidrologicheskih research explains the appearance of massive lagoons and wetlands in north-eastern Libya, some of which extend over 70,000 square kilometers. Dr. Tom Coulthard enthuses about a hundred thousand years ago, there were three great rivers, making their way through the thousands of kilometers across the Sahara to the Mediterranean, and that our ancestors may have walked along its banks.
The most abundant water from the point of view of researchers, readily flowing from south to north, and now in the dry riverbed Igargar (Igharghar), stretching for 800 kilometers up to the humid areas along the modern border between Algeria and Tunisia. It is the westernmost of the three uedov (as in Arabic called the dry valleys of temporary or periodic flow of water in the Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula), but earlier researchers found that prehistoric people went in the opposite direction - to the east.
Presumably, reaching the mouth of the Igargara, the ancient people, moving in an easterly direction along the coast of North Africa, crossed the Nile Delta, and continued on their way to the Middle East. The researchers believe that this river valley along its entire length abounded necessary to feed a large number of people resources, while the remaining two rivers flowed from the central regions of Libya today, most likely, and in those days were of low water.
Archaeological evidence for the correctness of this hypothesis is most found in the west of North Africa than in the east, therefore, prehistoric people for the most part moved along Igargary. Finds of classic stone tools, such as spearheads, indicate that ancient people willingly settled on the banks of the overflowing river.
Not involved in the study Garchea Italian archaeologist Elena (Elena Garcea) at the University of Cassino believes that this theoretical model provides a new and intelligent way to explain how our ancestors settled on the African continent, and then migrated to new lands. According to the German magazine Focus Web, experts from the Kiel Institute for the Study of Marine Sciences Leibniz (Kieler Leibniz-Instituts fur Meereswissenschaften) also found in the Libyan desert the remains of a vast river system that existed in the interglacial period.
Geologists from the University of Bern in 2011 has published the results of his research, which revealed that over the past 130,000 years in the Arabian Peninsula has gone through several phases humid climate. Their findings, researchers have built on the analysis of fossil marine sediments and cave stalagmites. Such tricks of climate took place only four times and lasted a limited time, but it was enough to ensure that Homo sapiens had to migrate from Africa to Europe and Asia.
Abundant precipitation again turned the Sahara desert into a green savannah, in which hundreds of lakes were formed, some of which reached 50 kilometers width and depth of 30 meters. Over the past 80 000 years ago, no significant rainfall in the Sahara do not fall out.
