Wet Weather & Human Exodus

[Rosemary]

Discovery Channel :: News - Archaeology :: Wet Weather Helped Human Africa Exodus

[FONT=&quot]Larry O'Hanlon, Discovery News[/FONT]

Oct. 1, 2007 — The view through a new window into the climatic changes in northeastern Africa suggests that it was a wetter climate that encouraged humans to migrate out of Africa between 130,000 and 100,000 years ago.

That's an interesting new piece of information! The equipment they use to find out these facts is very clever (to this non-scientific mind anyway!)

 

[Dave]

I also find this subject, which I think is called Phylogeography, fascinating. It brings together geneticists, archaeologists, palaeoanthropologists, climatologists and linguists; which is quite an unusual mixture.

I think it is generally accepted that it was climate change that has triggered human migrations, but what I hadn't realised is that the actual trigger is not always temperature, or even humidity (as that is suggesting.) It has been suggested that one of these triggers was that as sea levels rose, the salinity of the Red Sea changed resulting in a loss of regular food supplies.

 

[The Ace]

So we tried to escape the rain and ended up in Scotland. You couldn't make it up.

 

[Sephiroth]

It's an interesting point about the Sinai/Negev desert, it must have been a pretty forbidding place (some might say it still is).