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Ice Age Savannah

3 September 2019
Geology

One of the paradoxes of the last Ice Age is the existence of a savannah corridor that allowed animals and humans to spread into SE Asia. The region is now largely tropical in nature but back in the day a savannah environment stretched right across what is now the Malay peninsular, Thailand and Burma, into what was then Sunda Land – or what is now the islands of Indonesia. One complete block of land. The dates concerned are between 120,000 and 70,000 years ago  and explains how humans genetically linked to Denisovans ended up in the region. Rainforest did exist in the northern part of Sunda Land (across the top of Borneo and Sumatra). Rainforest and savannah do converge on each other in modern Africa – but see https://phys.org/news/2019-08-ice-age-savannah-corridor-large.html

Over at https://phys.org/news/2019-08-bones-la-brea-tar-pits.html … and concerns the fossil bones trapped in the La Brea tar pits – some 3 and a half million of them it would seem (which is of course an estimate). These include plenty of predators such as sabre toothed cats and coyotes and wolves etc. Hold your nose while reading this one as it is uniformitarian to the core.

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