Scientists have reconstructed the paleoecology the Paleo-Agulhas Plain, a now-drowned landscape on the southern tip of Africa that was high and dry during glacial phases of the last 2 million years and may have been instrumental in shaping the evolution of early modern humans.
In contrast to ice age environments elsewhere on Earth, it was a lush environment with a mild climate that disappeared under rising sea levels around 11,500 years ago.
An interdisciplinary, international team of scientists has now brought this pleasant cradle of humankind back to life in a special collection of articles that reconstruct the paleoecology of the Paleo-Agulhas Plain, a now-drowned landscape on the southern tip of Africa that was high and dry during glacial phases of the last 2 million years.
«These Pleistocene glacial periods would have presented a very different resource landscape for early modern human hunter-gatherers than the landscape found in modern Cape coastal lowlands, and may have been instrumental in shaping the evolution of early modern humans,» said Janet Franklin, a distinguished professor of biogeography in the department of Botany and Plant Sciences at UC Riverside, an associate member of the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, and co-author of several of the papers.
Some of the oldest anatomically modern human bones and artifacts have been found in cliff caves along the coast of South Africa. For many years, the lack of shellfish in some layers at these sites puzzled archaeologists. In spite of apparently living near the ocean, the inhabitants hunted mostly big game — the sort of animals that typically live farther inland.
Scientists knew a submerged landscape existed on the continental shelf just offshore, but it wasn’t until recently, perhaps inspired by rising sea levels of our current human-caused global warming, they realized these caves might have made up the westernmost edge of a long-lost plain.
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Materials provided by University of California — Riverside. Original written by Holly Ober. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.