I have now read the whole article and looked carefully at the map and have some conclusions. The writer has given us a fantastically interesting puzzle. Visually, it is much too regular to not be man made. I think I detect variances in widths in different regions. Some areas are more degraded than others. The water source is definitely the Okavango, and perhaps another river to the east which is much smaller. [I once saw a NOVA film showing how that area changed from wet to dry season, and that too was amazing. Huge increase in amount of water and flooded area.] Lines occur both east and west of Okavango, also north and south. Looking at areas between Okavango and Etosha I see faint hints of square and rectangular patches that look like they might have been delineated property areas. Perhaps concurrent with the use of the canals, or perhaps later land holdings.
The author’s thoughts on age refer to 7,000 years ago, and also 11 to 14 thousand years ago, in other words before and after the disaster that caused the Younger Dryas cooling. [SC, time for that Firestone book.]
In response to a question the author spouts some totally nonscientific thoughts on the age of dinosaurs not being 65 million years old because they are found on the surface. He does not seem to realize that many finds have been made of dinosaurs from cliff faces and road cuts into rocks of great age, and also between volcanic deposits that can be precisely dated. For that matter the Leakey’s found most of their million years old hominid remains on the surface of land where the newer layers had washed/eroded away. So far as his grasp of science is concerned, I am reminded of the saying—even a stopped clock is correct twice a day. Nevertheless, he has brought to our attention a truly exciting and complex puzzle on human civilization and is to be thanked.
Agreed. No doubt over time further information in regard to this area will come to hand.
Just because you or I haven’t seen it before does not mean its unknown. In fact I suspect it has been noted for decades.
Botswana geological society.
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
“Visually, it is much too regular to not be man made.”
On the contrary, it is quite impossible for these features to be manmade. Humans dig canals by taking the top layers of soil off the ditch being dug and upturning those soils onto the bottom of the pile or dune alongside the ditch. As the digging of the canal progresses what was previously the top layers become piled atop the other top layers of soil and the former bottom layers are piled atop the pile or dunes to become the new top layers. In other words, humans digging a canal overturn the soil so the former top becomes the new bottom and the former bottom becomes the new top layer.
Natural linear dune formations do not dig up the strata and overturn them like humans do. The winds blow the sand into long and parallel dunes using sand and dust blown from the surface soils in the adjacent terrain. This sand and dust is progressively piled without a substantial movement of the dunes that would otherwise destroy the parallel symmetry created by the wind patterns. This results in an a long dune structure with the base atop the basement strata and progressing from the older dust and sand strata at the base of the dune to the newer strata of sand and dust at the top of the dune. In other words, the pile of soil is obviously not removed from the basement strata and is obviously not overturned. Instead the dune was piled into place with the old at the bottom and the new at the top, unlike manmade canals and dikes. Geological corings and studies of these formations have demonstrated quite conclusively these are natural linear dune formations running parallel, in part because there is no evidence of artificial or manmade overturnings of the soils in their formation.