Holocene

Push that back 10,000 years and you land around 13,000 BCE.

In other words, deep in the Late Ice Age, before the Holocene.

At a time when large parts of the world were still locked in glacial conditions and global sea levels were over 100 metres lower than today, right away that claim is doing two things at once.

It's not just saying, these rocks are old, of course they're old.

They're based on global averages.

But that's already enough to answer a basic question.

Could people have physically stood on those rocks during the Late Ice Age and early Holocene? Yes, not just could.

They almost certainly did at some point.

It's just amazing.

Okay, so the name of this paper is Climate-Controlled Holocene Occupation in the Sahara, Motor of Africa's Evolution.

2006 in science.

Very interesting.

Let me see.

Okay.

So climate controlled Holocene occupation in the Sahara, motor of Africa's evolution.

by Rudolf Cooper and Stefan Kruppelin.

Culturally, which is also super interesting, is that revenge is motivated from being mistreated or social norms being compromised.

So this theory comes from the Holocene Era, which is the age of humans from around 12,000 years ago.

At that time, societies were mostly strangers, so social norms like not murdering people in the community were really important to, like, develop and to maintain.

So the idea is that people think revenge maintains the status quo, so it's like keeping the law and order, taking it into your own hands.

So, I mean, I don't remember the exact, the geological timetable in exact detail, but those are the basic concepts that stratigraphers, the means stratigraphers created.

So the two immediately relevant names of two epochs that we have to remember is the Holocene which literally means in etymologically recent times.

And it is that itself is an epoch.

And epochs can last for 10 million years, by the way.

And the ape family might be 6-7 million years.

But an epoch can be 10-20 million years.

In that context, the Holocene, the recent times, describe a period of recent warming of the planet at the end of the last ice age.

which happened roughly 11,700 years ago or something like that, roughly 12,000 years ago, when the planet warmed and made it possible for humans to conduct agriculture.

The alternative claim says, somewhere in that enormous stretch of time between rock formation and fourth dynasty architecture, there was a human moment, a window when conditions at Giza were very different from today, when rain was heavier, the Sahara was greener, and somebody with stone tools and organised labour was already reworking that bedrock.

That's why you almost always hear the same time windows, early Holocene and late Pleistocene.

The early Holocene is the period roughly between 11,500 and 7,000 years ago, after the last ice age ended, but before the Sahara dried out.

North Africa was going through what's sometimes called the African Humid Period.

Lakes, rivers, grasslands, people hunting, herding and gathering in landscapes that are now pure desert.

They then connect this to what we know about North African climate history.

Because the climatic premise behind the whole argument is simple but dramatic, the modern hyper-arid Sahara is a relatively recent thing, geologically speaking.

For much of the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, large parts of North Africa went through green Sahara phases.

If you were an ancient community looking for prime real estate ten thousand years ago, the mouth of a major river system draining onto a wide, gently sloping coastal plain would have been about as good as it gets.

So when researchers started asking if there were ever a submerged settlement from the early Holocene hiding somewhere off the Indian coast, where would it most likely be? The Gulf of Khambhat checked almost every box.

Shallow shelf, ancient exposed coastline, major river outflow, and a documented history of dramatic sea level rise in exactly the right time window.

On paper, it's close to the perfect location for something like this to exist.

And this is where the story exploded from interesting sonar anomaly into full-blown international news.

Because some of that material reportedly came back with radiocarbon dates suggesting an age of around nine thousand five hundred years.

If accurate, that would place these artifacts firmly in the early Holocene, thousands of years before Sumer, thousands of years before the first cities of Mesopotamia that we're taught mark the dawn of urban civilization.

You can imagine what happened next.

Not over decades, but you could see it shift if you lived your whole life there.

This was the early Holocene, the warming period after the Ice Age, and everything was in flux.

Year by year the ice sheets to the north were melting, releasing unimaginable volumes of fresh water into the ocean.

But that water hadn't reached Dogland yet.

It wasn't just a land bridge.

It was one of the most productive hunting grounds in human history.

A landscape caught in transition between two worlds, the dying ice age and the rising warmth of the Holocene.

And that transition created something extraordinary, a biological paradise where cold adapted mega fauna still clung to survival while warm weather species were moving in to claim their territory.

but then these experiments would stop the settlements would be abandoned people would return to full nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles this wasn't failure this was adaptation they tried agriculture the climate betrayed them and they were smart enough to recognize that mobility was safer than commitment to fixed farming the hunter-gatherer lifestyle meanwhile was actually working remarkably well this is something we need to understand clearly our modern bias assumes that agriculture was an obvious upgrade from hunting and gathering that civilization represents progress and anything before it was primitive misery But the archaeological and anthropological evidence tells a very different story.

Hunter-gatherers during the Pleistocene, and even into the early Holocene, worked fewer hours than agricultural peoples.

Studies of modern hunter-gatherer societies show they typically work about 15 to 20 hours per week to meet all their food needs.

The rest of the time is leisure.

One year the rains wouldn't come.

The next year they'd come too much and flood everything.

the wild animals you depended on would migrate away and not return your permanent village would become a death trap so humans stayed mobile not because they were primitive but because mobility was the only rational survival strategy in an unstable world then around eleven thousand seven hundred years ago everything changed the last ice age ended and earth entered what geologists call the holocene epoch but this wasn't just another climate shift The Holocene was different.

It was stable.