Team finds Southern East Africa getting wetter, not dryer
Friday, October 21, 2016 - 15:32
in Biology & Nature
The prevailing notion that the African continent has been getting progressively drier over time is being challenged by a new study that finds that drought has actually decreased over the past 1.3 million years and that the continent is on a 100,000-year cycle of wet and dry conditions. These new findings add a wrinkle to one of the keys to human evolutionary theory, the savannah hypothesis, which states that the progressively drier conditions in Africa led to prehuman ancestors migrating from forests and moving into grasslands.