A team of researchers discovered evidence of a lost river that ran through the Thar Desert near Bikaner almost 172 thousand years ago.
The team, from Anna University in Tamil Nadu, The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany and IISER Kolkata, claims that the Stone Age population lived in a landscape different from the arid region we see today and that the river may have helped them thrive.
The evidence shows the oldest directly dated phase of river activity in the Thar region. Before this, the oldest evidence of river activity comes from the Luni Valley active 80,000-90,000 years ago.
Deposits of river sands and gravels were studied near Nal village, using a method called luminescence. This helped them date the river system for the first time.