首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
A period of climate change about 130,000 years ago would have made water travel easier by lowering sea levels and creating navig
A period of climate change about 130,000 years ago would have made water travel easier by lowering sea levels and creating navig
admin
2014-06-02
39
问题
A period of climate change about 130,000 years ago would have made water travel easier by lowering sea levels and creating navigable lakes and rivers in the Arabian Peninsula, the study says. Such a shift would have offered early modern humans—which arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago—a new route through the formerly scorching northern deserts into the Middle East. The new paper was spurred by the discovery of several 120,000-year-old tools at a desert archaeological site in the United Arab Emirates. The presence of the tools—whose design is uniquely African, experts say—so early in the region suggests early humans marched out of Africa into the Arabian Peninsula directly from the Horn of Africa, roughly present-day Somalia Previously, scientists had thought humans first left via the Nile Valley or the Far East.
"Up till now we thought of cultural developments leading to the opportunity of people to move out of Africa," said study co-author Hans-Peter Uerpmann, a retired archaeobiologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany. "Now we see, I think, that it was the environment that was the key to this," Uerpmann said during a press briefing Wednesday.
The discovery "leaves a lot of possibilities for human migrations, and keeping this in mind, might change our view completely." During the past few years, a series of tools were discovered at the Jebel Faya site in the U.AE., some of which—such as hand axes—had a two-sided appearance previously seen only in early Africa.
Scientists used luminescence dating to determine the age of sand grains buried with the stone tools. This technique measures naturally occurring radiation stored in the sand. For the climatic data, scientists studied the climate records of ancient lakes and rivers in cave stalagmites, as well as changes in the level of the Red Sea. This warmer period 130,000 years or so ago caused more rainfall on the Arabian Peninsula, turning it into a series of lush rivers that humans might have boated or rafted.
During this period the southern Red Sea’s levels dropped, offering a "brief window of time" for humans to easily cross the sea—which was then as little as 2.5 miles wide, according to Adrian Parker, a physical geographer from Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom.
Once humans entered the peninsula, they dispersed and likely reached the Jebel Faya site by about 125,000 years ago, according to the study, published in the journal Science.
Geneticist Spencer Wells called the discovery a "very interesting find," especially because the Arabian Peninsula is becoming a hot spot for archaeological finds—particularly underwater, since the Persian Gulf was a fertile river delta during early human migrations. But he noted that the study doesn’t "rewrite the book on what we know about human migratory history." That’s because tools dating to the same period have already been found in Israel, so it’s "consistent with what we suspected" about an earlier wave of migration into the Middle East, said Wells, director of the National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project. Wells also noted there’s no evidence yet that the migrants in the new paper were our ancestors—the group, and their genes, may have died out long ago.
Bence Viola, of the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, agreed the finding was interesting but not that surprising, also citing the evidence of humans in Israel about 120,000 years ago. Viola, who wasn’t involved in the study, added that the migration route proposed in the paper makes sense on another level—the Arabian Peninsula would have been something early humans were used to. "If you look even today, the environment in the Horn of Africa, in Somalia or northern Ethiopia, is similar to what you see in Oman or Yemen—not like the big desert," Viola noted. "It’s not like they needed to adapt to a completely different environment—it’s an environment that they knew."
Why they made the trek is another question, since they wouldn’t have been hurting for food or resources in their African homeland, Viola noted. "Curiosity," he said, "is a pretty human desire."
The word "scorching" in the first paragraph means
选项
A、aboriginal.
B、primitive.
C、luxuriant.
D、baking-hot.
答案
D
解析
根据“…through the formerly scorching northern deserts...”可以确定,scorching应指“酷热的”,故正确答案是D项baking-hot(灸热的,极热的)。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/XypO777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
Norms:TypesandAcceptanceSociologistsfindthattounderstandaculture,itisveryimportanttounderstanditsnorms.Ⅰ.
BodySystemsAbodysystemreferstoagroupoforgans,whicharepartsofthebodythatdoaspecialjob,suchastheheart,
BodySystemsAbodysystemreferstoagroupoforgans,whicharepartsofthebodythatdoaspecialjob,suchastheheart,
Thebizarreanticsofsleepwalkershavepuzzledpolice,perplexedscientists,andfascinatedwritersforcenturies.Thereisan
Disneyland’sHistoryWaltDisneyhadavisionofaplace,amagicparkwherechildrenandparentscouldhavefuntogether.T
Howmanypeoplerecognizedthemaninthepictureswithin2days?
Theaimofajobinterviewistoestablishwhetheryouarelikelytodowellinaparticularjobinaspecificorganization.T
UniversityAwardsTheBA(orBachelorofArts)andtheBSc(orBachelorofScience)arealsocalled"【1】".SomeBritishunive
敦煌坐落在甘肃省西北的沙漠走廊地带,其西靠近新疆,其东是祁连山脉。这座有两千年历史的古城,曾经是联结中国和中亚的丝绸之路上一个重要的商队驻足地。如今,其吸引来客的主要原因在于敦煌是世界上已知的佛教艺术的一个最珍贵的宝藏的所在地——莫高窟。据一幅唐石刻所载,
Thedifferencebetweenvoicedconsonantsandvoicelessconsonantsliesin
随机试题
男性患者,45岁,工人。一年前逐渐出现心前区疼痛、无力、气短症状,有时出现心前区疼痛并放射到左上肢和左后背。三月来有过两次晕厥。BP130/70mmHg,P90次/分,双肺未闻及干湿啰音,HR110次/分,律不齐,强弱不一,胸骨左缘3、4肋间闻及粗糙
危险、有害因素分类的方法多种多样,安全评价中常用()的方法进行分类。
公路隧道仰拱开挖长度,对于土和软岩应不大于()m。
城市规划管理是一项政府行政职能,它包括()两部分。
请举例分析命题教学的一般环节。
根据下列材料回答问题。2015年我国钟表全行业实现工业总产值约675亿元,同比增长3.2%,增速比上年同期提高1.7个百分点。全行业全年生产手表10.7亿只,同比增长3.9%,完成产值约417亿元,同比增长4.3%,增速提高1.9个百分点
创新驱动发展战略
Youshouldspendabout20minutesonthistask.Thetablebelowshowstheresultsofasurveytofindoutwhatmembersofacity
【B1】【B16】
Ithasbeensaidthateveryonelivesbysellingsomething.Inthelightofthisstatement,teacherslivebyselling【C1】______,p
最新回复
(
0
)