The emergence of deserts in Arabia had a decisive impact on the evolution and migratory movements of mammals including our human ancestors. This is the conclusion reached by an international team of researchers led by Tübingen professor Madelaine Böhme in a paper published in Nature Communication Earth & Environment. In their study, the scientists, who come from Germany, Bulgaria, Iran, Egypt and Canada, examined climate signals in rocks from Mesopotamia. Using chemical, physical and geological methods, they were thus able to reconstruct a 10-million-year climate history of Arabia for the first time.
Northern Arabia is the gateway to Africa. Today, it is home to desert areas, such as the Syrian Desert, the Israeli Negev Desert or the Saudi Nefud Desert, as well as wetter steppes and semi-deserts in Mesopotamia. By examining rock layers from the 2.6 km thick section of the Zarrinabad and Changuleh synclines at the foot of the Zagros Mountains near the Iran-Iraq border, the research team found four short-lived phases of initial desertification in Mesopotamia. These lasted only a few tens of thousands of years, 8.75, 7.78, 7.5 and 6.25 million years ago, each interrupted by humid climatic periods. But 5.6 million years ago, coinciding with the desiccation of the Mediterranean Sea, a 2.3 million-year hyperarid climatic phase began in Arabia, which the researchers christened NADX (Neogene Arabian Desert climaX). This exceptionally long-lasting period of desert climate was ended only by global warming 3.3 million years ago. “These results initially surprised us because, contrary to our initial hypothesis, the data show a phase-shifted relationship between desert formations in Arabia and in the Sahara,” Böhme says. Originally, scientists assumed that both desert regions should behave in the same way. In contrast, the subtropical Sahara desert appears to be causally linked to polar ice formations, but the mid-latitudinal Arabian-Mesopotamian desert formed in concert with low water levels in the Caspian Sea. The emergence and disappearance of deserts in the north of Africa and in the west of Asia resembles a kind of swing, a desert swing as Böhme calls it, characterized by a back-and-forth development of desert conditions alternatively in the Sahara and Western Asia.
“This swing mechanism,” she continues, “is a key to understanding the faunal relationships between Eurasia and Africa,” because the reciprocal desert evolution in the Sahara and Mesopotamia creates, the scientists argue, a kind of push effect for mammals from mid-latitudinal West Asia into subtropical Africa. As deserts expand in Mesopotamia, organisms shift their habitat away from the arid core southwards into Africa, but also westwards and eastwards into Europe and South Asia. It has been known for some time that the evolution of today’s African savanna fauna took place in relative seclusion over the last five million years, and that the ancestors of many characteristic animals, e.g. rhinos, giraffes, hyenas and big cats, originated in Eurasia. But the causes and driver of this evolution were previously unclear.
“We have now for the first time studied in detail the relationships of African and Eurasian mammals and found that the majority of immigrants from Europe or Asia colonized Africa in two spurts just over seven (7.2) and six million years ago, however, no African mammal reached Eurasia during this time,” summarizes Prof. Nikolai Spassov, of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Both waves of dispersal out-of-Eurasia followed a short desert phase in Arabia. The researchers now suspect desertification as the driving force of this unidirectional into-Africa dispersal.
Prior to 7 Ma, hominoids in Africa are primitive forms with no direct phylogenetic relation to individual extant hominid clades (pongines or orangutans and hominines or African apes), explains Prof. David Begun of the University of Toronto. In contrast, hominids from Eurasia between 12.5 and 7.2 Ma include stem members of both pongines in Asia and hominines in Europe. The earliest African hominines are the probable hominins Orrorin and Sahelanthropus. Orrorin is dated to 6 Ma while Sahelanthropus is probably closer to 7 Ma. This is consistent with the earlier dispersal event hypothesized here at about 7.2 Ma. Hominines likely enter Africa at this time. Begun notes that candidates for the ancestors of African hominines include the thinly enameled dryopithecins, known primarily from western and central Europe, and the thickly enameled Graecopithecus-Ouranopithecus group from the southern Balkans and Turkey. The subsequent evolution of extant hominids is largely endemic in their respective Asian and African clades, with no dispersals between Africa and Eurasia after about 6 Ma, until humans leave Africa before 2 Ma.
During the mega-desert phase NADX, however, the African continent was shielded from exchange with Eurasia for 2.3 million years. The African savanna fauna evolved during this period and our human ancestors, the australopithecines, diversified. African apes, which are bound to more humid forested conditions, survive but do not thrive as they had in the late Miocene of Europe. Humid climatic conditions during a global warm period that began 3.3 Ma ended the isolation of Africa and allowed a two-way faunal exchange between Africa and Eurasia. The first dogs, pigs and sheep appeared in Africa, and the precursors of mammoths and Asian elephants dispersed into Eurasia.
Böhme is convinced that “with these data and the new dispersal model, climatological explanations for two central phenomena emerge for the first time”: the ‘Out-Of-Europe’ hypothesis for the evolution of African apes and humans, and the endemic evolution of African savanna faunas, including australopithecines, the latter caused by the 2.3 million-year NADX desert phase in northern Arabia.
Publication: Madelaine Böhme, Nikolai Spassov, Mahmoud Reza Majidifard, Andreas Gärtner, Uwe Kirscher, Michael Marks, Christian Dietzel, Gregor Uhlig, Haytham El Atfy, David R. Begun, Michael Winklhofer: Neogene hyperaridity in Arabia drove the directions of mammalian dispersal between Africa and Eurasia. Nature Communications Earth & Environment, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021-00158-y