12000 years ago. funny how that date keeps showing up
Thousands of fish once swam in central Libya—what happened to them?
www.popsci.com
The fossil record also shows swimmers seeing a decline over the years as the area’s climate changed. Remains from the earliest dates are made up of around 90 percent fish species, but by around 5,000 years ago aquatic animals made up less than half of the population. By then, only small, hardy fish built to outlast shallow waters and high temperatures remained.
Savino di Lernia, an author of the study and the Director of the Archaeological Mission of the Sapienza University of Rome, has been working in Libya since 1990. He says that around 12,000 years ago, shifts in monsoon patterns brought rain to the region. With increased rain grew waterways that connected to Lake Chad in the south and the Nile River in the north, possibly opening up a passage for these fish to reach the central Sahara in such quantities.
Marks found on the fish remains show evidence of other residents: The humans who munched on them.
“I was personally surprised by the fact that fish were a type of staple food, even during neolithic, pastoral times,” di Lernia says. Eventually, many of those people would become sheep and goat herders.
Around 5,000 years ago, the climate changed dramatically.
Due to changes in the atmosphere caused by Earth’s position while orbiting the sun, monsoon seasons changed rapidly, and the rain that kept the Sahara green virtually vanished, says study author Andrea Zerboni, a geoarchaeologist at the University of Milan.