Skull of Mr Ples, a large male Australopithecus africanus, found in Sterkfontein Member 4 by the late Alun Hughes in 1989. Yet, wherever the early members of the human family were evolving, they needed water to drink and to keep cool. Proximity to water was the most important factor in the location of an evolving group like the early hominids. They must have lived near springs, rivers, lakes and freshwater estuaries. Denied water in warm, tropical or sub-tropical climates, humans quickly become dehydrated and death may follow in days.
Water is necessary for survival and an essential ingredient for evolutionary change.
Water and human dispersal Water helped distribute humans across the planet, along seashores, lakes and river banks. This would have accounted for the prehistoric peopling of most of the Old World, from Africa to Europe and mainland Asia. Strolling or swimming along the beach would have been sufficient to carry mankind from the Horn of Africa to the Peloponnesos of Greece, from the Levant to the Korean Peninsula, from Singapore to Siberia. When much water was bound up on land as glaciers in the Ice Ages, sea levels were lower than they are today, and previously submerged land-bridges appeared, helping spread humans to new parts of the earth. At such times, it would have been possible to walk dryshod from Tripoli and Tunisia to Malta and Sicily, from South Korea to South Japan and from the Sakhalin Peninsula to Hokkaido, North Japan, from Malaysia to Sumatra, Java and Bali and from Siberia to Alaska over the 500km-wide land connection called Beringia.