Giant stone-age axes found in African lake basin

PhysOrg.com ^ | September 10, 2009 | Unknown

[decimon]

Four giant stone hand axes were recovered from the the dry basin of Lake Makgadikgadi in the Kalahari Desert.

Oxford University researchers have unearthed new evidence from the lake basin in Botswana that suggests that the region was once much drier and wetter than it is today.

They have documented thousands of stone tools on the lake bed, which sheds new light on how humans in Africa adapted to several substantial climate change events during the period that coincided with the last Ice Age in Europe.

Researchers from the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford are surveying the now-dry basin of Lake Makgadikgadi in the Kalahari Desert, which at 66,000 square kilometres is about the same size of present day Lake Victoria.

Their research was prompted by the discovery of the first of what are believed to be the world’s largest stone tools on the bed of the lake. Although the first find was made in the 1990s, the discovery of four giant axes has not been scientifically reported until now. Four giant stone hand axes, measuring over 30 cm long and of uncertain age, were recovered from the lake basin.

[Scythian]

suggests that the region was once much drier and wetter than it is today

? much wetter and drier? anything of about 400 years old is crap shoot, the rest is utter nonsense like this story

[ApplegateRanch]

about a gut building his log cabin in Alaska

What does his obesity have to do with anything? That is offensively pejorative to Americans of a size!

[ApplegateRanch]

It was wetter, until the logs soaked up the water, and sank, making the area drier...until the logs dried out, refilling the lake and starting the cycle all over again. This went on for centuries...perhaps millennia...until the logs finally rotted to the point that they no longer functioned.

This is why logging is an environmental disaster that leads to global desertificational flooding; and why saw mills are always associated with ponds full of both floating and sunken logs.

You need a carefully controlled mix of both dry and waterlogged logs to maintain a mill pond, without it either flooding or drying out.

Obviously these Paleolithics hadn't yet discovered that fact.

[redhead]

"Seem too large to be useful. How does their size compare with that of other stone axes?"

It looks like they could have been used for breaking bones of large prey, like the massive woodland bison or early elephants, rhinos, or large grazers. The implements look like they range from twice the size of previously discovered axes to as much as six or eight times. Interesting.

[Nikas777]

lol = gut = guy. Who was more fit by the look of him in his 60s than I am in my youth right now.

[Lazamataz]

It was colder and hotter, and lighter and darker too.

[wxgesr]

They used to hide them there when invading armies would come to search for illgeal weapons. Kind of like Saddam did with his buried air force in the sand.

[SunkenCiv]

:’D

[Reeses]

also littered with tens of thousands of other smaller stone-age tools

Why would they leave thousands of unbroken tools scattered upon a field? It never occurs to modern academics that this might have been a battlefield. They cannot accept that humans are war makers by nature.

[decimon]

They used to hide them there when invading armies would come to search for illgeal weapons.

Maybe they didn't hide them so invading armies would change their minds.

[colorado tanker]

shown that the mega lake was filled with water on multiple occasions in the last 250,000 years

Call the global warming posse! Someone wandered off the reservation!

[OB1kNOb]

[GeronL]

lol.

I am sure that is correct

[SunkenCiv]

Evolution in Your Face
by Patrick Huyghe
Omni

Lake 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!

[Natural Law]

"What were they doing out on the lake with big hand axes like that?"

These were two hand ax tools most likely used in the fabrication of dug-out canoes.

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. Evolution in Your Face by Patrick Huyghe Omni Lake 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! 12,400 years ago? Hydrologic cycle came to a screeching whoa for some reason, hmm, what could it have been? To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.