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If I tell you to imagine extreme weather conditions, one of the first things that comes to mind is the desert. They cover more than one fifth of the land area and they are called drylands because they lose more water through evaporation than they get from yearly precipitations (rain, snow etc.).
And now if I asked you to describe how life in the desert looked like, which animal and plant species live there, you might think of a couple of them: scorpions, cactus, camels, some reptiles and maybe small mammals (rodents).
There are hot deserts (the largest: Sahara in Africa), but also cold deserts (the largest: Gobi in Asia). And there are deserts so dry, so harsh, like Atacama from Chile, that scientists studied them to get clues about life on Mars; as if you were in a simulation of Martian life! But this out-of-this world desert receives a lot of water every now and then, and many wildflowers can grow at once!
But in the past deserts used to be wetter and greener — this is how scientist can explain how migratory groups hadn’t died while crossing Gobi Desert, the Junggar Basin, and the Taklamakan Desert at different moments in the past.
Sahara went through a couple of wet phases when it was occupied by vegetation, forests, lakes and human communities. One of these periods took place 120.000 or more years ago and another one in the early Holocene (8000 years ago after the last Ice Age) and it was called the African Humid Period (for the kids: humid — wet). Once the humid period ended there was a very quick transition between wet and dry conditions. Scientists stated that this dynamic shift between dryland, grassland and forests most likely influenced the migration of people and animals and it still does nowadays. It also allowed homo sapiens to migrate out of Africa through Sahara Desert without dying of thirst or hunger.
People adapted to the new weather conditions, they replaced fishing and hunting with farming and herding, but losing resources to the drought pushed people into migrating to more hospitable areas along the Nile. But this period opened the windows for the migration of people out of Africa.
Anthropologist Michael Petraglia thinks that early modern humans may have prospered in the Arabian area until desert expanded and water disappeared. “If you want to know how climate change may affect us one day, well, we’ve got a whole story here about the effects of climate change on human populations,” he says.
