The remains of a rat from some tens of thousands of years ago could shed light on the potential existence of a travel corridor of temperate climate from Africa to Europe, Israeli researchers said Tuesday.
The remains of a maned, or crested, rat were found in Israel during excavations in 2016 by archeologists searching for ancient scrolls. Hundreds of bones were found in a cave in the southern Judean Desert.
The researchers said that the presence of the rat’s remains suggested that there may have been a corridor of land to Israel from East Africa with a similarly damp climate to enable to species to survive the migration.
“Genetic proximity allows us to assume that the primitive subspecies also lived in a climatic environment similar to the one in which it lives today,” the researchers said. “Because the same African species came to the Judean Desert through an ancient climatic corridor, it is also likely that humans who migrated from Africa to the Levant at that time were also aided by the same ecological corridor.”
Only one of the bones found at the site could be dated using carbon-dating and was revealed to be from 42,000 years ago.
The remainder of the bones could not be analyzed using this method, meaning that they were over 50,000 years old.
However, researchers at the Geological Survey of Israel were able to date gypsum fragments discovered with the bones, which put the earliest timeframe for the rodent at 120,000 years ago.
The researchers concluded that the rodent lived in the Judean Desert around 42,000 to at least 103,000 years ago.
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