Subtitled, "Grass corridors helped migrants dodge tsetse flies".
Map of Africa showing Lake Victoria basin and Gogo Falls.
Posted on 03/12/2015 7:02:39 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Once green, the Sahara expanded 5,500 years ago, leading ancient herders to follow the rain and grasslands south to eastern Africa. But about 2,000 years ago, their southward migration stalled out, stopped in its tracks, archaeologists presumed, by tsetse-infested bush and disease.
As the theory goes, the tiny tsetse fly altered the course of history, stopping the spread of domesticated animal herding with a bite that carries sleeping sickness and nagana, diseases often fatal for the herder and the herded.
Now, isotopic research on animal remains from a nearly 2,000-year-old settlement near Gogo Falls in the present-day bushy woodlands of southern Kenya has cast doubt on these longstanding ideas.
...this study, to be published March 9 in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS), shows that both domestic and wild herbivores living in this region at the time of the Gogo Falls settlement had diets consisting primarily of grassland vegetation -- a fact that makes it unlikely the region was then plagued by bush-loving tsetse flies...
Since grassland and woodland vegetation leave unique and different isotopic signatures in the teeth of animals that consume them, the research team was able to confirm that the region was surrounded by extensive grasslands at the time of the Gogo Falls settlement...
By showing that tsetse flies likely were not a problem during the time of the Gogo Falls settlement, this new study suggests that the use of both domestic and wild food sources may have been more of a choice than a necessity.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.wustl.edu ...
Map of Africa showing Lake Victoria basin and Gogo Falls.
Evolution in Your FaceLake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, is home to more than 300 species of cichlids. These fish, which are popular in aquariums, are deep-bodied and have one nostril, rather than the usual two, on each side of the head. Seismic profiles and cores of the lake taken by a team headed by Thomas C. Johnson of the University of Minnesota, reveal that the lake dried up completely about 12,400 years ago. This means that the rate of speciation of cichlid fishes has been extremely rapid: something on average of one new species every 40 years!
by Patrick Huyghe
Omni
Gogo dancing originated there.
Just goers to show you that most scientists, just like regular people, don’t know $hit from Shinola.
Just theories. Some are right. Some are wrong. They make sense until they don’t.
Doesn’t change my life one little bit.
No, what it shows is that knowledge isn’t carved in stone, it’s found out through investigation, unlike journalism, which produces press releases like this one.
I predict that someday lost civilizations will be discovered who once lived in the Sahara.
j’)
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