This could be important, because in addition to actual climate differences, differences in soil type and water retention could have made for a much friendlier environment for apes. Rough land with a mixture of open woodland and brush could have created a sort of giant “jungle Jim” combining vertical aspects of the land, downwood, and trees, with brush and grass in a very tight mosaic.

Movement through such landscape would have combined some brachiation with scrambling and some running and vertical climbing. Often there would be handholds at waist level or so, allowing a four-handed movement with a vertical body and short arms.

Such a landscape might have been ideal for an Australopithecene.

Geomorphological Evidence and Pleistocene Refugia in Africa

Ecology and dynamics of the woody vegetation on the Kalahari Sands in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe

Both are actually on other topics, but the abstracts (I can’t get to the actual articles) contain references to large areas being covered by windblown sand in the form of linear desert dunes.

From the latter reference:

“The Kalahari sand dune systems of central and southern Africa are built up from the surface sediments of the Kalahari Beds, extensive continental deposits which accumulated in a great internal basin (De Swart & Bennett 1974). The dunes are thought to have been formed during the last glacial maximum, 18000-13000 B.P. (Heine 1982), under the influence of easterly winds (Lancaster 1979), during a period of less than 150 mm rainfall (the maximum threshold for sand movement) and inn a vegetation-free environment. […] In Zimbabwe they cover the southwest part of the country with the ridges being most prominent in the far south-west (Thomas 1984).”

I would assume that similar processes took place during earlier glacial maxima, starting in the early pleistocene.

I’d gotten the impression that a large amount of windborn sand was deposited over previous hilly landscape sometime around either the Pliocene/pleistocene boundary or a little later, with much of the modern brushland on top of it. My sources are all non-scholarly, however, which is why I’m a little tentative about it.

I think the time scale for this major basin having been closed way predates the period I’m talking about here, but yes, during somewhat wetter times there may have been ape-friendly (counting the presumed woodland apes like hominid) habitats from somewhere south of the equator all the way to the southern coast.

Apes everywhere, under certain conditions.

If this landscape contained mostly open woodland it could have contained a large diversity of apes including Australopithicenes. Most of the fossils would have been buried.

Given an inability to find good references to African landscapes and their history, I have no way to guess how plausible this is. Can you comment?

I also wonder whether a similar situation might exist in the Sahel (with Sahara sands rather than Kalahari).