Assessing long-term habitability at an eastern Sahara oasis: ESR dating of molluscs and herbivore teeth at Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt

Abstract

In the northeastern Sahara, electron spin resonance (ESR) dating of when animals lived documents their habitability in Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt. A Middle Pleistocene paleolake(s) covered >1700 km 2. At eastern Locality Dak348, 10m thick, remnant lacustrine marls yielded Pleistocene fauna, rare artefacts, and plant casts. No obvious unconformity exists within these deposits. From upper horizons, a hartebeest tooth ESR dated at 195 ± 11 ka, correlates with Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 7, while molluscs from a stratigraphically higher horizon averaged 89 ± 10 ka, correlating with MIS 5a/b. At western Locality Dak006, upslope deflation has left a temporally mixed surficial lag. Numerous lagged tooth fragments, independently dated by ESR, correlate with MIS 5 through 17. Fragments from a slope sand unit correlate with MIS stages 3 through 6. One bovid tooth associated with Younger Middle Stone Age artefacts in the base of the sand dated at 84 ± 7 ka (MIS 5a/b). Molluscs from Romano-Byzantine backdirt at a breached artesian vent dated to 8-15 ± 1 ka, suggesting that ponds formed during MIS 1 and 2. Even without well defined sedimentary contexts, ESR frequency data indicate that the oasis was habitable for herbivores during at least twelve stages in the Mid-Late Quaternary, and, therefore, likely also for humans.

International workshop on human occupations of the Nile Valley and neighboring regions between 75,000 and 15,000 years ago

“…Further south, in Sudan, correlation between Nile flows and sapropel S2 suggests a time of high water influx to the main Nile at ~55 ka, while during the LGM, both the White and the Blue Nile exhibit very low water discharge and high seasonality . In addition, oases in the Eastern Sahara have yielded evidence for habitability in the late Pleistocene, building a more complex picture than an “empty Desert” at that time …”

“…5 In addition, oases in the Eastern Sahara have yielded evidence for habitability in the late Pleistocene, building a more complex picture than an "empty Desert" at that time. 6 [8][9][10][11] North of the first cataract, few sites are known from the late MP and early UP, the majority of which are raw material procurement sites. 8,9 Only scarce evidence for human presence across the Abydos High Desert landscape dates to the last 70 ka.…”

“…One main discussion point of the workshop was how to reconcile results from different fields. Most evidence for modern human Affiliations of participants: 1 University of Toronto (Canada), 2 University of Adelaide (Australia), 3 KU Leuven (Belgium), 4 University of Cassino (Italy), 5 Estonian Biocentre, Tartu (Estonia) and University of Padova (Italy), 6 Ronin Institute, 7 Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva (Israel) and University of Oxford (UK), 8 UMR CNRS 7194, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris (France), 9 Institut National des Sciences de l'Archéologie et du Patrimoine (INSAP), Rabat (Morocco), 10 UMR 5199 PACEA, University of Bordeaux (France), 11 Polish Academy of Science (Poland), 12 University of Cambridge (UK), 13 The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), and 14 In particular, three main research avenues to enable new insights regarding population connectivity and dispersal within the region were pointed out, and these include the necessity to continue and organize new fieldwork in the Nile Valley and adjacent deserts, to refine the chronological resolution of human occupation and paleoenvironmental data in this area, and to conduct systematic comparisons of the archeological record between the different regions.…”

Were springline carbonates in the Kurkur–Dungul area (southern Egypt) deposited during glacial periods?

“…Holocene (Szabo et al 1995;Churcher et al 1999;Kindermann et al 2006;Geyh and Thiedig 2008;Brookes 2010;Drake et al 2011;Hamdan and Lucarini 2013;Hamdan and Brook 2015;Kleindienst et al 2016). Similarly, it is older than the closest phase of growth in speleothems from Hoti cave (10.5 to 6.2 ky, Burns et al 2001) (Williams et al 2010) dated to 15-5 ky BP by AMS radiocarbon and ascribed to the African Humid Period are reported from the central and northern Sudan.…”

The Main Nile Valley at the End of the Pleistocene (28–15 ka): Dispersal Corridor or Environmental Refugium?

“…Tufa deposits were formed during times of alkaline spring discharge, the latter likely linked to a high groundwater table in the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer (Nicoll et al, 1999;Skinner et al, 2013). Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) dates on shells and mammalian teeth suggest the presence of surface water in Kharga and Dakhleh during several phases of the Late Pleistocene, including during MIS 2 (Blackwell et al, 2012;Blackwell et al, 2017;Skinner et al, 2013;Kleindienst et al, 2016;Kleindienst et al, 2020). These MIS 2 dates are consistent with evidence for groundwater recharge of the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer during late MIS 3 / the first part of MIS 2 (pre-LGM) (e.g., Pachur and Hoelzmann, 1991;Abouelmagd et al, 2014).…”