The DOI matches its Crossref record; 27 of the 27 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
A humid corridor across the Sahara for the migration of early modern humans out of Africa 120,000 years ago
Open accessAbstract
It is widely accepted that modern humans originated in sub-Saharan Africa ≈150–200 thousand years ago (ka), but their route of dispersal across the currently hyperarid Sahara remains controversial. Given that the first modern humans north of the Sahara are found in the Levant ≈120–90 ka, northward dispersal likely occurred during a humid episode in the Sahara within Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 5e (130–117 ka). The obvious dispersal route, the Nile, may be ruled out by notable differences between archaeological finds in the Nile Valley and the Levant at the critical time. Further west, space-born radar images reveal networks of—now buried—fossil river channels that extend across the desert to the Mediterranean coast, which represent alternative dispersal corridors. These corridors would explain scattered findings at desert oases of Middle Stone Age Aterian lithic industries with bifacial and tanged points that can be linked with industries further to the east and as far north as the Mediterranean coast. Here we present geochemical data that demonstrate that water in these fossil systems derived from the south during wet episodes in general, and penetrated all of the way to the Mediterranean during MIS 5e in particular. This proves the existence of an uninterrupted freshwater corridor across a currently hyperarid region of the Sahara at a key time for early modern human migrations to the north and out of Africa.
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Cites
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Revising the human mutation rate: implications for understanding human evolution
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Self-citationWet phases in the Sahara/Sahel region and human migration patterns in North Africa
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Metadata
- Authors
- Osborne, A. H., Vance, D., Rohling, E. J., Barton, N., Rogerson, M., & Fello, N.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2008-10-28
- Volume
- 105
- Issue
- 43
- Pages
- 16444-16447
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W2036584892
- Cited by
- 290
- References
- 27
- FWCI
- 81.39
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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- Osborne, A. H., Vance, D., Rohling, E. J., Barton, N., Rogerson, M., & Fello, N. (2008). A humid corridor across the Sahara for the migration of early modern humans out of Africa 120,000 years ago. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0804472105
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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