Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
200,000 years ago right down to 40,000 years ago, showing that this area
was inhabited since long before the Great Migration began. It seems likely
that the earliest inhabitants were Neanderthals, but when and how were they
subsequently displaced by modern humans? Puzzling questions of origins
also confront us at a living site excavated by workers from the University of
Shei eld at Riwat in northern Pakistan the 1990s . 13 This collection of stone
tools, along with some tantalizing indications of post-holes that might have
been supports for shelters, has been dated to at least 45,000 years ago. Who
were the people who left these traces? Were they in transit or permanent set-
tlers? Were they part of the Great Migration? We simply do not know.
At the time of the Great Migration much of the Persian Gulf was land
instead of sea, so that the confl uence of the Tigris and Euphrates fl owed
directly into the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. In theory the length-
ened rivers would have ended in a rich estuary that would have provided the
migrants with everything they needed.
But when the Persian Gulf was dry, becoming a hot parched Persian Val-
ley, it ef ectively doubled the length of the Tigris-Euphrates river system
before it could reach the sea. The lowered rainfall during this glacial period
would have made the rivers smaller and more seasonal, and the hot sun
would have beaten down unmercifully on the waters as they fl owed through
the Persian Valley for that extra thousand kilometers. It seems possible that
the Tigris-Euphrates might have faded away, disappearing into the sand,
just as the Okavango River disappears into the Kalahari Desert in southern
Africa today. When the early migrants reached the end of these rivers they
would have been faced with a forbidding barrier of sand followed by a full
2,500 kilometers of dry and inhospitable coast before they reached the Indus
Valley at what is now the border between Pakistan and India.
The coasts of Iran and western Pakistan are grim today, and they may
have been even grimmer then. If the migrants had to surmount this vast
unfriendly region of coast, it would not be surprising if they only managed
to do it once. How did they accomplish this feat? They might have crept along
the coast, surviving in occasional oases. They might have swung inland, leav-
ing behind some of the stone tools that have been found in Iran and Pakistan.
Or they might have leapfrogged the coast by embarking on dauntingly long
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search