Searching for evidence of ancient human existence, researchers cross the inhospitable Namib Desert

The Namib Desert contains a treasure trove of stone tools about which little is known because it is very difficult to access them. There are few roads and vehicle access is limited in this protected area located in the western desert of Namibia.

So when two researchers, Professor Dominic Stratford and Dr George Leader, decided to explore possible archaeological sites in what is considered one of the driest and most inhospitable deserts in the world, they didn’t had no choice but to explore the landscape on foot.

Both academics are associated with the University of the Witwatersrand and the College of New Jersey, USA, and have a long association with Namibia.

The plan was to follow the course of the ancient Tsondab River which flowed from the central escarpment westwards towards the sea, an area which is today the Namib Naukluft National Park. By following the river, the two archaeologists hoped to find evidence of human and hominin use of this ancient landscape.

Ahead of them would be a hike of more than 100 kilometers through a landscape of gravel plains and sand dunes, some of which rise more than 100 meters above the interdune plains.

Namibia is still relatively unknown territory for both archeology and paleoanthropology, as few parts of the country have been explored in detail by scientists. So far, no ancient hominid fossils have been found in Namibia, although Stratford believes they are there and waiting to be discovered.

During the 1980s, anthropologist Myra Shackley traveled across southern Namibia to document many isolated sites, including a few sites on the bottom of the Namib Sand Sea, where she discovered handaxes attributed to the early Stone Age and areas rich in Middle Stone Age tools.

Over the past four years, a small team of interdisciplinary paleoscientists led by Leader has worked at two of these sites to better understand their ages and how the hominids who made the stone tools survived in the desert.

It was Shackley’s initial findings and the data recovered during the new research project that motivated Leader and Stratford to go hiking in June.

“We decided that the best thing to do to really understand the distribution of sites across the landscape would be to do a good transect across the desert,” Stratford says.

But getting there would require hard work, with both men carrying everything they would need for their expedition.

They began their journey just north of Solitaire, a small town near the eastern edge of Namib-Naukluft National Park.

It was planned to be resupplied three times per vehicle as they prepared for their journey to the sea. In addition to carrying everything on their backs, they also pulled a cart which carried most of their water and food.

They discovered that it was going to be more difficult than initially expected. Climbing these high dunes while pulling a cart was torture.

“It was horrible, we had planned for about a mile an hour, and the first day we hit the dunes we did a mile in five hours,” Stratford says.

They quickly learned to identify the more compact sand on the dunes, which allowed them to climb more quickly.

The two men walked 10 hours a day for 12 days across the immense desert landscape, where temperatures rose to 38 degrees Celsius, then dropped to a chilly 5 degrees at night. During this time they endured a two-day sandstorm, and as they got closer to the coast, thick fog and cold, fine rain soaked everything and made it very difficult to choose the right path through the dunes.

Stratford almost didn’t make the trip. Just three weeks before leaving for Namibia, he found out he needed to have his appendix removed.

“I said to the doctor, ‘I’m supposed to be in Namibia in three weeks, crossing a desert,’ to which the doctor replied, ‘Well, we’ll see how your recovery goes,’ and then he said: “You’re not supposed to lift anything for six weeks after the operation. “So it was a pretty tense time and I definitely didn’t want to let my teammate down.”

Fortunately, Stratford was healed enough to be able to walk when they left.

If something went wrong, they had satellite trackers monitoring their movements and a helicopter at Walvis Bay was available if a serious emergency evacuation was needed.

As they traveled the river, they took sediment samples that they hope will tell them how long the river had been flowing and how strong it was.

So little is known about this river that its course and length are not at all clear. It is the tiny patches of river deposit and ancient ephemeral bowls found between the dunes that tell the story of the river’s course and human presence in the desert.

What the two men found were surprisingly well-preserved stone tools.

“There were artifacts everywhere, and some of them were pretty breathtaking,” Stratford says.

Some of these tools could be 1.4 million years old and made long before the arrival of modern humans. The most recent tools, however, can be between 200 and around 30,000 years old.

But in the past, the landscape Stratford and Leader walked through was sometimes very different from the hyper-arid desert we see today.

Fossils discovered in the area have revealed that animals such as elephants and antelopes once lived on the banks of the Tsondab River and in the bowls it filled when the river won its battle against encroaching dunes.

“People claim that the Namib Desert is the oldest desert and it has been that way for millions of years. In reality, it has changed a lot over its history, with wetter periods punctuating an older landscape. and more arid,” says Stratford. .

Their journey across the Namib ended with a dash for the coast. The plan called for a third supply drop 26 km from the coast (budgeted as a two-day march through the coastal dunes), but this had to be canceled when it became clear that the support vehicle would not be in place. able to cross more of the high dunes. towards the north to approach it.

Stratford and Leader had a choice.

“We either turn around and meet them somewhere, giving up on the last leg, or we push on and try to do it all in one day with the supplies we have left,” Stratford says.

They decided to continue. This day would consist of hiking 16 miles (nearly 26 km) over huge coastal dunes, with loose sand.

They were to reach the meeting point on the coast at 9 a.m. the next morning, at low tide, the only time a vehicle sent from Walvis Bay could reach them. If they missed the deadline, they would have to wait another 24 hours before they could be picked up, and they would run out of food and water. “We arrived at the beach with 15 minutes to spare,” says Stratford.

During their expedition, they discovered more than 40 new archaeological sites that spanned almost the entire length of the transect, from east to west, and they returned home with many unanswered questions about the ancient river and the people who apparently do too. explored this landscape several thousand years ago.

One is why humans and early hominids ventured into such harsh areas most of the time, while places with abundant water and rich flora and fauna did not. were not that far away (200 km).

In the future, Stratford and Leader want to return to Namibia to perhaps do another exploratory overland hike to explore some of the huge swaths they only briefly sampled during their walk. They must also find a way to excavate the isolated archaeological sites they have discovered.

But in crossing this hostile environment, Stratford came to see these ancestors, whom he tries to understand, in a different light.

“It’s very easy to drive to an archaeological site and not really have a sense of what it takes to be there. But when you go in and you’re sitting there, surrounded by dunes, and you’re sleeping there, and If you get crushed by a sandstorm or two, then you start to wonder about why you made those choices, and also why the hominids who were around thousands of years ago would also these choices.