Yet if the
constant rainfall and the vegetation of the Libyan desert area in
Palaeolithic days is all a myth (as it most probably is), how came the
embedded palaeoliths, found by Gen. Pitt-Rivers, in the bed of diluvial
detritus which is apparently _debris_ from the plateau brought down by
the Palaeolithic _wadi_ streams?
Water erosion has certainly formed the Theban _wadis_. But this water
erosion was probably not that which would be the result of perennial
streams flowing down from wooded heights, but of torrents like those
of to-day, which fill the _wadis_ once in three years or so after heavy
rain, but repeated at much closer intervals. We may in fact suppose
just so much difference in meteorological conditions as would make it
possible for sudden rain-storms to occur over the desert at far more
frequent intervals than at present. That would account for the detritus
bed at the mouth of the _wadi_, and its embedded flints, and at the
same time maintain the general probability of the idea that the desert
plateaus were desert in Palaeolithic days as now, and that early man only
knapped his flints up there because he found the flint there. He himself
lived on the slopes and nearer the marsh.
This new view seems to be much sounder and more probable than the old
one, maintained by Flinders Petrie and Blanckenhorn, according to which
the high plateau was the home of man in Palaeolithic times, when the
rainfall, as shown by the valley erosion and waterfalls, must have
caused an abundant vegetation on the plateau, where man could live and
hunt his game.
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