Although the Durham expedition established the Dilit area as a promising place, no archaeological research has been carried out in the region since. The Durham team located extensive lacustrine deposits bearing harpoon points, lithics and pottery. The first evidence for early Holocene human settlement in West Turkana was reported from the Dilit area (formerly described as Kabua, Figure 1) in the early 1960s by a Durham University expedition (Whitworth 1965). Early Holocene sites containing microliths, bone harpoons and pottery have been documented in the basin, the majority of them from the east side of the lake ( Barthelme 1985 Phillipson 1977 Robbins 1974). The Turkana Basin in northern Kenya became a mega-lake in the early Holocene, with abundant aquatic resources and lush grasslands for hunter-fishers to exploit (Abel 1982 Butzer 1980). In Africa, sites associated with aquatic intensification have been reported in the Sahelian-Saharan belt, dating roughly from 9500-5000 years BP (Holl 2005). Under the wet and intermittently dry conditions of the early Holocene (10-6 ka BP), lakeshores, seashores and rivers became attractive for human exploitation in many parts of the world (Erlandson 2001). After the long period of arid conditions in the terminal Pleistocene, the global climate turned to wet and humid at the onset of the Holocene Interglacial ~10 ka BP (Gasse 2000 Hassan 1997).
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