By Erin Wayman
Three rivers now interred beneath heaps of sand in the Sahara Desert might have been the superhighways of the Stone Age.
Simulations reveal that the rivers, each about as big as the Missouri or Rhine River, meandered across the Sahara 125,000 years ago. Early humans probably followed the lush corridors as migration routes across North Africa, scientists propose September 11 in PLOS ONE.
Satellite data and other geologic evidence had previously suggested that now-extinct rivers once snaked across the Sahara. But the records couldn’t say when and how much water flowed, says Jennifer Smith, a geologist at Washington University in St. Louis. The simulation, she says, “gives us a much clearer picture of these landscapes.”