Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 111
The challenges facing early human migrants as they traversed the blistering
coasts of what is now Iran and Pakistan must have been considerable, but their ingenuity was
clearly up to the task. Even at the present time, in the extremely unfriendly desert of Sinai,
porous dyke intrusions lace the hills and bring water to unexpected places. The walled Bed-
ouin garden seen here has been maintained by these water seeps for hundreds of years.
the Middle East into southern and northern Asia carried only one of these
lineages. Stephen Oppenheimer of Oxford University and his co-workers
suggest that this is evidence that only one small group made it through the
deserts to the east of the Mediterranean. They point out that other notable
human migrations such as the invasion of the Americas carried several mito-
chondrial lineages with them.
Why was the breakout from Africa and the Levantine coast of the Medi-
terranean so dii cult? The logical route for these early migrants to take
would have been north and then east, through what were then the wet and
