This story is a good-news, bad-news situation.
According to a study published in Nature Communications, the bad news is that part of eastern Africa is slowly tearing itself away from the rest of the continent. Even worse, it’s further along than scientists thought. The “sooner than expected” part needs context, though. We’re still talking hundreds of thousands to millions of years, not something that will ruin your upcoming Kenyan safari tour.
Specifically, the region in question here is the Turkana Rift, a 500-kilometer stretch across Kenya and Ethiopia where tectonic plates are pulling apart. Using seismic imaging, researchers found that the Earth’s crust there is only about 13 kilometers thick at its center, compared to over 35 kilometers nearby. That thinning is called “necking,” and it means the land is weakening right down the middle, like dough that’s been stretched too thin and is starting to tear. Eventually, that process leads to a full split, creating a new ocean and a new island nation.
Geologists have known Africa would split someday. What’s new is how far along this particular section already is. The rift has been forming for about 45 million years, but it looks like it started to get serious about breaking up only about 4 million years ago.
Africa Is Splitting Apart Faster Than Scientists Thought, But There’s Good News
Now, here’s the good news: the same geological fracturing that’s yanking the continent apart may also explain why this region has been a goldmine for human fossils. Roughly a third of Africa’s ancient hominin fossils come from this small area. As the land stretched and sank, it created basins that filled with fine sediments, which are perfect for preserving bones.
Volcanic eruptions layered ash on top, effectively timestamping everything, providing archaeologists with a perfect little patch of land that seemed designed exclusively for making grand archaeological discoveries, like the world-famous Lucy, a 3.2 million-year-old ancestor of ours found in Ethiopia, whose discovery has filled huge gaps in our understanding of our own evolution.
The researchers think that it’s possible that East Africa didn’t necessarily produce more early humans, but these rifts made it naturally better at preserving archaeological evidence. It was literally rearranging itself in a way that could make discovery easier millions of years later.
It is slowly breaking apart, but in the meantime, we can take advantage of the opportunity to learn as much as possible from all the archaeological goodies being unearthed.
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