Many of you will have seen my last video on the ancient cave settlement in Turkey, a site known as Gedikayya or Inhisar Cave, which contains evidence of a human settlement from 16,500 years ago.
After reading this news story in the Turkish press, I researched the time period and saw that it coincided with the H1 Heinrich Event, which saw global temperatures plunging, a few thousand years before the famous Younger Dryas event.
During H1 we have reduced global temperatures, which varies from continent to continent and we have a more arid North Africa with low lake levels. But this is actually the tip of the iceberg and with more research, around 16,500 years the Earth was in the middle of a major and sudden climate catastrophe.
Much of Africa and all of Southern Asia saw an expansive mega-drought between 17,000 and 16,000 years ago and this was one of the most intense and far-reaching dry periods in the history of modern humans.
This drought struck all of southern Asia and most of the African continent. Africaâs Lake Victoria dried out and this is the worldâs largest tropical lake and source of the River Nile. The same happened to Lake Tana in Ethiopia and Lake Van in Turkey. Monsoons from China to the Mediterranean brought little or no rain.
In my last video, I linked the cave deposits of the Inhisar Cave in Turkey to this major climatic event and I donât think itâs a coincidence that people in this region settled in a deep cave, especially during a time of colder temperatures, but is there more evidence of humans moving into caves around the time of the H1 event when the world was gripped by a major climate catastrophe?
Watch this video to find out!