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172,000 years old ‘lost’ river found in Thar Desert

In a major development related to the life of the Stone Age Man, researchers have discovered the existential proof of a “lost” river, which ran amidst the central region of Thar Desert.

The evidence of the 172,000-year-old river near Bikaner has allowed researchers to find the source that helped humans to live in the area, acting as a major support system.

The journal called Quaternary Science Reviews mentioned the findings of the research that shows the oldest dated stages of activity in the river located at the Nal Quarry.

Combined efforts of researchers and analysts from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, Anna University in Tamil Nadu, and IISER Kolkata represented in their study that the Early Man survived in that state of Thar desert, which is utterly different from the present day.

The study further found that the river flowed close to Bikaner, Rajasthan that is approximately more than 200 km far from the closest next modern-day river.

These findings show the proof for the present-day river courses stretched through the Thar Desert along with the dried course of Ghaggar-Hakra River.

Researchers said the existence of this lost river could have provided the human populations a major factor to survive, and act as a vital passage for migrations.

JimbobBlinkhorn of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, one of the institutes involved in the study, said, “The Thar Desert has a rich prehistory, and we’ve been uncovering a wide range of evidence showing how Stone Age populations not only survived but thrived in these semi-arid landscapes.”

He added, “We know how important rivers can be to living in this region, but we have little detail on what river systems were like during key periods of prehistory.”

When the satellite images were seen, a thick connecting network of river channels passing across the Thar Desert was noted.

However, they said that even though the existence could be found, the time period of existence couldn’t be found through the studies. For that, ground research had to be done in the central Thar Desert.

After deep research involving the exposure of river sands and gravels was done close to the Nal village, the researchers could proceed to discover the various phases of river activity.

“We immediately saw evidence for a substantial and very active river system from the bottom of the fluvial deposits, which gradually decreased in power through time,” a researcher said.

Furthermore, ‘luminescence’ was employed to determine the dating period of the burial of the quartz grains in the river sands.

According to the results found, the strongest river activity at Nal occurred at approximately 172 and 140 thousand years ago. During this time, the rains and monsoons were much weaker compared to the ones we encounter today.

This showed that the river remained active until between 95-78 thousand years ago and got reactivated about 26,000 years back.

The time period during which the river remained active interestingly falls within the same timeframe of the expansions of humans from Africa to India.

“This river flowed at a critical timeframe for understanding human evolution in the Thar Desert, across South Asia and beyond,” said Blinkhorn.

“This suggests a landscape in which the earliest members of our own species, Homo sapiens, first encountered the monsoons and crossed the Thar Desert may have been very different to the landscape we can see today,” he added.