| At all times, hominids and humans
seen to have followed water courses
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· Here you can see wild changes in sea level of Lake
Chad in central Africa since the Ice Age alone, during which it
had disappeared completely.
· Being a very flat lake in an arid region like the Aral Sea in central Asia, small changes in sea level in Lake Chad too evoke great changes in surface and shoreline.
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| · The proposed findings of fossil remains of A.
Afarensis from roughly a thousand times longer ago than the last Ice
Age seem to be in Bahr el Gazal, a now dried - out river bed
or wadi running towards the Lake Chad.
· Not too far away lies the Tibesti Range, where barking crocodiles still survive in shadowed puddles hidden in deep mountain gorges surrounded by miles of desiccated Saharan Desert that once, thousands of years ago, was covered by rivers and lakes and inhabited by stone age people.
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· Even thousands of thousands of years ago human predecessors seem to
have inhabited places on the continent which were then not quite in the
geographical and climatic zones they are today.
· The vicinity of Lake Chad was then, for all we know, 100 miles
further south, possibly still in the spread of the african equatorial rainforest.
It may even have been part of a tropical swamp region at that time. The same
goes, of course, for parts of the Rift Valley.
· In fact, around where Lake Chad now lies, once Germany lay on the northern coral-reefed shores of the Tethys Ocean which were later to become part of the Alps and Italian marble quarries, but that was even thirty to fourty times longer ago: 150 million years, during the life and time of the first bird Archaeopteryx, whose fossils are now found in central Europe.
Trace
the Continental Drift
The History of Human Technology
JHR 08 / 2002