Migrations

huff huff huff

WHO’S THERE ?!

HALT! I said HALT or I’ll SHOOT!

HALT in the name of the LAW! BANG!BANG!

BY MARCO PALOMBELLI & PETER GITAU

I’ve never been here before...

Really? aren’t you one of the paleontologists?

I can’t see - I don’t have eyes! Yes, the origins of hominids!

AAAAAAHHH!

No, they took a plane and left... ...I’m leaving too. My village has been taken back by the desert - there’s nothing there for me anymore... I’m a fossilized skull! Don’t you remember? You've been digging here for months!

Pity, they were uncovering a pretty sweet part of our origins...

Our origins?

See all these lines in the rock? They tell the story of a particular kind of lake you can find only here, on the Rift Valleys: the “amplifier lakes”.

Imagine the Plio-Pleistocene* and our beloved Rift Valley filled with large lakes that separated the very first few groups of hominids.

Large forests allowed their populations to grow a lot before splitting into smaller groups moving nothward or southward to richer areas.

As time went by, the inclination of the Earth's axis rotated and climate shifted.

For a transitional period of about 2500 years, the lakes receded and so did the forests, facilitating migrations both eastward-westward and northward-southward.

Migrations fostered by a harsher environment.

The end of that transition gave way to a dry period where the now-dry valley and much harsher environment forced populations into small patches of forests.

These wet-dry periods happened multiple times in the past, separating and differentiating our ancestors more and more, until we, modern humans, came into being.

But the orientation of Earth's axis kept rotating, slowly shifting the climate and moving the cycle back to a new wet phase.

Populations shrank and became more isolated as migrations were rendered either very arduous or impossible.

Admittedly, a lot of fellow hominids went extinct during this process...

yeah... I wish!

So I have to try to cross the border unseen.

That’s rough! Nowadays you can take one of those “planes” to escape your harsh land, just like the archeologists!

But I can’t. If someone like me loses their home to the desert, they have no right to ask for asylum in another country.

And here I thought only dead things got stuck in one place long enough to become fossils!

Good luck! May the chains of history and politics be less cumbersome than those of the climate!