River bank life of Early Humans

Many people conjure up images of our earliest human ancestors living in the hot dried out dusty environments where many of their remains have been found. Unfortunately, such images don’t take into account the changes in environment that have occurred since those times when early peoples walked the Earth.

Archaeologists of course have thought of such things and for many years have thrown ideas back and forth debating whether these people may actually have lived by rivers and streams – as those that came later built civilizations along rivers such as the Nile – or whether they lived in woodlands.
Now new evidence has come to light that suggests the former might be more likely. Husband and wife team Royhan and Nahid Gani have been studying the sediments surrounding the place where Ardipithecus ramidus, aka, “Ardi,” was found in Ethiopia and have discovered that most of the evidence in the area points to a group of people that lived near a very large river. Their paper on the subject will be published in Nature Communications.

Ardi is believed to have lived some four and half million years ago in what is now Aramis, a hot and dry part of Ethiopia, but until now no serious study had been done on the earth in which the skeletal remains were found. After doing so, the Gani’s discovered that the earth was actually layers of sandstone most likely the result of an ancient stream overflowing it’s banks periodically. Branching out, the team discovered that the sediments indicated that this stream was actually a river, measuring twenty six feet deep and over twelve hundred feet wide
Next they turned their attention to plant material that had been preserved in the sandstone, measuring their isotopes, and found that the material had come from grassy plants, suggesting a savannah type environment. But once again, widening their area of study, they also found that there were large changes in the types of plant material in the area. This caused them to surmise that there were patches of forests near the rivers and streams.

Based on these two pieces of information, the team suggests that it appears Ardi, who many researchers believe is our oldest found ancestor, lived in a savannah, near fresh flowing water. Some suggest that such an environment would be consistent with learning to walk upright to see over the tall grasses.
http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/01/2012/river-bank-life-of-early-humans