Fish might not be top of the menu in the Sahara Desert today , but that ’s exactly what its inhabitants were dining on over 10,000 years ago .
archeologist from the Natural History Museum of Belgium and the Sapienza University of Rome have chance upon nearly 18,000 animal bones in a stone tax shelter eff as Takarkori in southwestern Libya . Up to 80 per centum of these bones belong to Pisces , including species like wolf fish and genus Tilapia , while around 19 percent were mammals , including Barbary sheep , Dorcas gazelle , and rock coney . The remain 1.3 percent was made up of snort , reptilian , mollusk , and amphibious aircraft remains .
This for sure was n’t a prehistoric zoo or aquarium either . On many of the pinched remains , the archeologist fall upon the presence of stinger mug and burns , express the animals had been butchered and cook .
Reported in the journalPLOS ONE , the bones were date at between 4,650 to 10,200 old age quondam , placing them in an geological era know as the early Holocene . Around this prison term , the Sahara was avery different place . Far from being a desert , this flight strip of North Africa was lusciously green and alive , cover in lakes and flora life . It only bulge to become a desert environment around 8,000 years ago due to a combination of human activity and broad environmental factors .
So , grant this noesis , it is perhaps unsurprising that the Sahara ’s inhabitants use up a lot of Pisces . Interestingly , the new research also shows that the amount of fishbone appear to decline over time . Between 8,000 to 10,200 years ago , Pisces the Fishes made up over 90 percent of the bones detect at Takarkori , while only accounting for 40 per centum of all corpse follow to 4,650 to 5,900 year ago .
Clearly , there was a gradual dieting change from fish to livestock . While it ’s not whole unmortgaged what prompted the diet change , the investigator strongly suspect that it ’s relate with the Sahara turning from a luscious land of lakes to an arid bone - dry desert .
“ The amount of fish is decreasing through clip and the share of mammalian increases , show that people at Takarkori focussed bit by bit more on hunting and livestock keeping . It is undecipherable if this was an designed cognitive process or if this shift could be related to increase thirstiness , which made the surround less favorable for fishes , ” the researcher write in their newspaper publisher .
Pisces was often the go - to meal for prehistoric humans . Another field of study print this month studied the fish - weighed down dieting of multitude experience in northern Norway during the Stone Age and found it was riddled withdangerous grade oftoxic metals . Bon appétit !
