Combined Zonation of the African-Levantine-Caucasian Areal of Ancient Hominin: Review and Integrated Analysis of Paleogeographical, Stratigraphic and Geophysical-Geodynamical Data

The origin of the man at the Earth is directly associated with the determination of directions of the flow distribution of the ancient man migration to adjacent territories. In such studies traditionally mainly landscape and climatological changes are considered. We suggest that along with the above factors, regional tectonic-geodynamic factors played a dominant role in the character of migration. The considered African-Levantine-Caucasian region is one of the most complex regions of the world, where collisional and spreading processes of geodynamics converge. First is determined an essential influence of the Akchagylian hydrospheric maximum (about 200 m above the mean sea level) limiting the ancient men migration from Africa to Eurasia. We propose that the Levantine Corridor emerged after the end of the Akchagylian transgression and landscape forming in the Eastern Mediterranean. This corridor location was formed by the movements between the Dead Sea Transform and the boundary of the carbonate platform of the Mesozoic Terrane Belt. Further landscape evolution was largely determined by the geodynamic behavior of the deep mantle rotating structure occurring below the central part of the region under study. All the mentioned events around and in the Levantine Corridor have been studied in detail on the basis of the combined geodynamic, paleogeographic, and paleomagnetic analyzes performed in northern Israel (Carmel uplift and Galilee plateau). Careful studies of the Evron quarry geological section indicate that it is a unique one for the dating of the marine and continental archaeological sequences and sheds light on the movement of the ancient man along the Levantine Corridor.


Introduction
The problem of origin, features of evolution, changes in the landscape and climatic conditions of habitation and migration of ancient hominin ultimately forced to formulate a number of promising methodological and theoretical studies (e.g., Bobe et al., 2007Bobe et al., , 2010Camps and Chaudan, 2009;Bar-Yosef and Belmaker, 2011) . Since this most important research program is associated with the Late Cenozoic history of the Earth (and not only with it, but also with its most active tectonic region), we consider it necessary to reveal the leading geological and geophysical factors of the appearance and development of ancient humans in the transition zone of Gondwana and Eurasia (Ben-Avraham et al., 2005;. In this regard, the Eastern Mediterranean is the central region through which, for many hundreds of thousands of years (and in general -according to radiometric and paleomagnetic data (Scardia et al., 2019) about 2.0 Ma), hominin moved from the primary East African range to the regions Eurasia ( Figure 1).
The narrow Levantine Corridor was an important link in this route of movement (Bar-Yosef, 1987). It passed near the coastline of the Neotethys-Mediterranean basin in the epoch of mass migration of late hominins (Groucutt et al., 2021), which was changing its shape due to tectonic-eustatic and glacioeustatic factors of geodynamics (Eppelbaum andKatz, 2015a, 2022).
If we consider the migration path as a whole, then the paradox of the seemingly broken habitat of ancient hominin, which includes three habitats: (1)
However, from the standpoint of regional geology and the evolution of terrestrial processes, it has not been systematically analyzed due to the fact that, in theoretical and practical terms, the data of global geodynamic mapping and zonation of this complex region became the subject of generalization only recently (e.g., . To solve these problems, a variety of mapping methods were applied: paleogeographic, geomorphological, geophysical, paleomagnetic, structural-tectonic, and planetary-geodynamic. Together with them, both their own data (Katz, 1986;Eppelbaum and Katz, 2012 and literary sources in the field of historical planetology, cyclic stratigraphy, paleopedology, and ecological-stratigraphic analysis were widely involved in order to compare marine and continental formations. Along with this, numerous data on geological mapping were attracted Krasheninnikov et al., 2005;Segev and Sass, 2010;Karcz and Sneh, 2011;Sass et al., 2013;Sneh, 2013Sneh, , 2018. The unique sections, where Pliocene marine and lagoon formations are replaced by continental ones, containing Acheulean artifacts with numerous remains of large mammals have been investigated (e.g., Braun et al., 1991;Tchernov et al., 1994;Heimann. and Braun, 2000;Ron et al., 2003;Trifonov et al., 2019).
The constructed maps and diagrams make it possible to shed light on the planetarygenetic reasons for the evolution of early hominin: landscape-geomorphological, paleoclimatic, geodynamic, and deep tectonic-thermal and hydrospheric factors of the development of their habitat. A description and analysis of the comparison of the obtained materials with anthropological data are given below in the relevant sections.

Formulation of the Problem
The origin of Man on the Earth and the ways of his migration are, in fact, among the most important problems in the field of natural sciences. The discoveries of the latest decades have allowed for a significant breakthrough in the field of ancient ecosystems, where the way of life of ancient people, artifacts of that time, and elements of biotic and abiotic habitats were studied. Of the abiotic factors, only landscape and climatic features were usually considered. The factors of the regional geological-geophysical environment were used only partially (for example, Ben-Avraham et al., 2005).
It should be noted that the region of the Eastern Mediterranean and the adjacent regions of Eurasia and East Africa is one of the most complex in the world in geological and geophysical terms. Many of the most important features of its structure have been identified only in recent years (e.g., Bosworth et al., 2005;Hall et al., 2005;Krasheninnikov et al., 2005;Ben-Avraham et al., 2006;Reilinger et al., 2006;Stern and Johnson, 2010;. Therefore, as the leading areas of research, we applied the method of analysis of hydrospheric disturbances, new aspects of plate geodynamics, and detailed integrated methods of geological mapping, paleogeography, and event stratigraphy. We propose that the emergence of the noosphere (Vernadsky, 1945) was preceded by three main events that determined the emergence and development of Man. The first of them, the inception of the evolution of hominin, was caused by the Messinian crisis , a plate tectonic event (Lapkin and Katz, 1990) that caused the drainage of the residual Tethys ocean and vast shelf spaces and the development of climate aridization and a sharp change in ecosystems in the equatorial segment of the planet in the epoch of 5.8-5.3 million years ago. The second most important event was the Akchagylian hydrospheric maximum (3.6-1.8 Ma ago), which caused flooding of the shelf of southern Eurasia and, in part, high plateaus, and erosional valleys adjacent to the Mediterranean (Eppelbaum and Katz, 2022). The third event is associated with the regression of the end of the Pliocene -the beginning of the Quaternary period and the emergence of continental glaciation (0.9-0.8 Ma ago).
Let us go back to the second event. Climate humidification in the equatorial segment led to the intensification of glaciation at the poles and in the highlands (e.g., van Baak et al., 2019), and an abrupt change of landscapes in the primary habitat of hominin with the replacement of tropical forests by grassy savanna (Bobe et al., 2002Rogers and Semaw, 2009;Dennel, 2010), and biotic communities (Leakey and Werdelin, 2010).
The maximum Akchagylian transgression of 2.6-2.1 Ma ago (up to +200 m above the modern mean sea level) (Eppelbaum and Katz, 2022) closed the migration route to the north, where there were vast bays, mountain ranges, and arid volcanic plateaus. Only in the epoch of the post-Akchagylian regression 2.0-1.8 Ma ago and in the process of activation of the deep mantle structure  with the formation of fault valleys and strike-slip basins, did the descending structure of the Levantine Corridor appear. Its favorable ecological niches served as multiple stopovers on the way of Man's movement to the east of the Forward Asia. At the end of the post-Akchagylian regression period (about 1.1-0.8 Ma ago), there was the development by Man (Hershkovitz et al., 2021) of southern Eurasia and northern Africa (e.g., Camps and Chauhan, 2009;Fleagle et al., 2010).
The subsequent epoch of human migration and evolution was qualitatively different (de Menocal, 2004) both in terms of planetary (meridian skew of the Earth's figure with the intensification of seismological and glaciotectonic movements), contrasting climate of the epoch of continental glaciations with sharp fluctuations in sea levels (Milankovitsch, 1941;Morner, 1980). The factors of changes in the abiotic environment contributed to fundamental changes in the composition of ecosystems . From this point of view, the concept of the Quaternary period (or Anthropocene (Gibbard et al., 2021)) is planetologically specific and does not depend on regional factors and the professional arguments of certain research groups or schools. The change of the Neogene equatorial transgression to the polar one with a corresponding change in the shape and speed of the Earth's rotation in the Anthropocene (844 thousand years ago) is a natural physical and planetary boundary of the stratigraphic scale. Hydrodynamically, this boundary is marked by the Cassian-Türkian regression of the Tethys-Paratethys basin, corresponding to the mark of the sea-level drop to -200 m .
And the geodynamical meridian skew of the Earth's figure was expressed in the movements of the Khovaling tectonic phase between the Kulyab and Kyzyl-Suu series of Central Asia (Dodonov, 1986).

Paleogeographic and Geological-Geophysical Aspects
The problem of origin, features of evolution, and settlement of ancient hominin is closely related to the evolution of the habitat, caused by geological and geophysical processes in various shells of the Earth, which form their dynamics and structure. The existence itself of the African-Levantine-Caucasian way of settlement of the ancient Man has a significant number of planetological analogies: geophysical, biotic, cultural-historical, socioeconomic, etc. This is, of course, connected with the planetary-geophysical uniqueness of the region. Immediately to the east of the way, a step of the Ural-African geoid anomaly is developed, and in the north there is a critical parallel of 35 о (Figure 2), which is an area of conjugate deformation of the Earth's rotation ellipsoid (Veronnet, 2012;. And approximately in the middle of the migration path, at the interface between the collisional structures of the Mediterranean and rift-spreading structures of the Red Sea system, there is a projection of the central zone of the deep mantle structure (Eppelbaum et al., 2020, which initiates the rotation of the overlying lithospheric formations in a counterclockwise direction. The East African area of origin of ancient hominin (East African Rift Belt) ( Figure   1) is located in the zone of the southern pericline of the deep mantle structure, where in the rift zone the Nubian, Arabian, Somalian, and Victorian lithospheric plates are articulated ( Figure 2). Here, under the conditions of active modern rifting, a blocky relief of the volcanic plateau with landscapes optimal for the habitation of ancient people was formed.
The central Eastern Mediterranean region (carbonate platform of the Mesozoic Terrane Belt of the Levant) is insignificant in the area and is located near the projection of the uplifted zone of the mantle structure ( Figure 2). This area was formed at the border of two lithospheric plates, Sinai and Arabian. And it is in this tectonically unstable zone that the Levantine Corridor runs (Figure 1), along which the migration of ancient people from Africa to Eurasia took place for many hundreds of thousands of years. Its features will be discussed below.
The fairly wide and diverse Caucasian range (Anatolian-Caucasian zone of the Alpine orogen) of ancient hominin (e.g., Belyaeva and Tesakov, 2020) is located in the northeastern pericline of the deep mantle structure ( Figure 2). An area of active orogenesis is developed here, in which folded, volcanic areas and foothill and intermountain depressions filled with sediments are combined. As a result, active migration from south to north was carried out, bypassing mountain ranges along the coasts of the Caspian and Euxine basins ( Figure 1). The area under consideration is located in the contact zone of the Eurasian, Aegean-Anatolian, and Arabian lithospheric plates. The population of the last two plates was probably insignificant due to the unfavorable nature of the ecosystems developed here.
Each of the three habitats with sites of ancient hominin (Table 1) differs in terms of the age of the development of the habitat. The age estimates presented are based on the data of the isotope-radiochronometric and paleomagnetic methods, taking into account the refinement by the methods of stratigraphic and paleogeographic analysis.
The East African range (East African Rift Belt) of the hominin with the oldest finds of artifacts of the Oldowan type of stone industry is 2.6-1.6 Ma old and belongs to the species Homo rudolfensis and H. habilis 2.6-1.9 Ma old and the younger species Homo erectus, industry 1.9-1-6 million years ago and then began to manufacture Acheulean artifacts and began to master fire and the manufacture of bone and other tools (Gowlett, 2009 (Belmaker, 2010), with an age of 1.6 Ma and younger. The reason for the absence of sites with older age in the zone of the emerging Levantine Corridor will be discussed below.
The Caucasian area (Anatolian-Caucasian zone of the Alpine orogen) is located at a distance of more than 1000 km from the Eastern Mediterranean; if we do not take into account the East Anatolian sites, the age of which is insufficiently substantiated by radiometric methods. The most ancient site Dmanisi ( Figure 1) reliably belongs to the Olduvai episode (Garcia et al., 2010) and has an age of about 1.85-1.78 Ma, which corresponds to the Gelasian and Calabrian boundary of the Mediterranean scale and Akchagylian-Absheronian of the Paratethys basin scale (Belyaeva, 2020).
The more northern sites of the Greater Caucasus ( Figure 1) (from Dagestan to Taman) have a younger age -about 1.1-0.8 Ma (Amirkhanov, 2020). However, according to other data (Trifonov et al., 2019), they are close in age to the Dmanisi site. In general, the problem of correlating rocks containing artifacts according to paleomagnetic data requires correction by more accurate research methods. Nevertheless, these data fit into the young radiometric age of sites with artifacts in remote regions of Eurasia and Africa.
The difference in the age of the described areas of ancient hominin sites with artifacts and the very isolation of areas sets the task of finding geological-geophysical and ecological-historical obstacles in relation to the formation of an extensive ecumene at the turn of the Pliocene and Pleistocene. It is most clearly manifested in relation to the geological structure and evolution of the Levantine Corridor -a transitional zone of settlement from closed basin ecosystems into the vast expanses of Eurasia.

Tectonic-Geodynamic Aspects of the Formation of the Levantine Corridor
The reasons that impeded the migration of ancient people from Africa to Eurasia were traditionally considered only in terms of changes in climate, landscape, and the nature of the evolution of biotic relationships. From the standpoint of historical planetary science, such an approach seems incomplete both in causal and physical-geographical and historical-evolutionary terms of changes in natural landscapes. In the region under study one of the most difficult ways to overcome natural obstacles was a narrow section of the Eastern Mediterranean -the Levantine Corridor, passing through a very complex geological structure of the Mesozoic Terrane Belt (Eppelbaum and Katz, 2015a) and thousand years ago. Therefore, the separation of some parts of the marine Pliocene and its assignment to the Pleistocene is incorrect from the standpoint of historical planetology.
The last Pliocene transgressive maximum was established on the platform in Eurasia, and the marks of the Akchagylian Sea were revealed, reaching +186 m (Vostryakov, 1964). In the Epipaleozoic platform area of Great Britain (Bennison and Wright, 1969), the same Pliocene transgressive maximum reached 180 m. Within the continental plates of Gondwana, similar studies were carried out only in Egypt (Chumakov, 1967). It was found that Pliocene ingressions in the Nile erosional valley reached in the south to the latitude of Sudan and reached elevations of about +200 m. An analysis of all these data with paleogeographic reconstructions of the Pliocene Tethys and Paratethys basins is given in our generalizing work (Eppelbaum and Katz, 2022). The materials presented made it possible to carry out special studies indicating the development of marine formations on the Pliocene shelf of the Eastern Mediterranean in the area of the future Levantine Corridor.
For many years we have been engaged in regional and local mapping of various regions of Israel using geophysical methods for exploratory (e.g., Eppelbaum andKatz, 2011, 2015a) and engineering and geodynamic (e.g., Eppelbaum et al., 2007Eppelbaum et al., , 2012Eppelbaum et al., , 2015aEppelbaum et al., , 2015b) and archaeogeophysical (e.g., Eppelbaum, 2010;Eppelbaum et al., 2010). Justification of their stratigraphic sequence, age, conditions of formation, and relationship with the continental Pliocene, its artifacts, and remains of the fauna of large mammals became possible thanks to the study of the unique Pleistocene section in the Evron quarry and its environs ( Figure 6). This area has been studied by many specialists: geologists, paleontologists, archaeologists, petrographers, paleomagnetologists, and researchers in the field of radiometric dating (Issar. and Kafri, 1969;Ronen and Amiel, 1974;Ronen, 1991;Tchernov et al., 1994;Porat and Ronen, 2002;Ron et al., 2003). There are no analogs of such a section in the world, since the combination of Pliocene marine formations underlain by the trap complex, overlapped by continental formations bearing artifacts and remains of large mammals, is an object of study of supreme importance.
The marine Pliocene occurs on the sediments of the Cretaceous-Eocene carbonate platform. Above these formations are two complexes of Miocene traps, which are the westernmost offshoot of the largest trap field, the Harrat Ash Shaam of the Arabian Plate, as can be seen on the paleomagnetic map ( Figure 4). Two complexes are developed here -Middle Miocene Lower basalts with an age of 16.1 Ma (Evron-1) and 14.5 Ma (Evron-3) and Upper Miocene Intermediate basalts with an age of 6.3 Ma (Kabri-15). Early Pliocene Cover basalts are absent in this area, but they occur in the Galilee 17 km southeast of the Kabul area and have a radiometric age of 3.76 Ma, which corresponds to the end of the Early Pliocene or the Gilbert Paleomagnetic Epoch.
Thus, according to regional radiometric data, the age of the Pliocene marine strata in the Eastern Mediterranean corresponds at least to the Gauss and Lower Matuyama  (Gvirtzman and Buchbinder, 1969;Eppelbaum and 2015a).
To assess the climate of the Pliocene transgressive maximum epoch in the African-Arabian region, a paleoecological reconstruction of benthic communities in the Pliocene Sea of the Evron region was carried out (Figure 7). A warm-water association is developed here, in which attached, drilling, burrowing, wandering benthos, and bottom floating organisms are developed. This association is quite comparable with the coastal warm-water association of the modern Mediterranean Sea, which corresponds to the interglacial epoch when there is no continental glaciation. The development in the Pliocene section of carbonate sediments, sharply different from the coastal terrigenous formations of the modern Mediterranean Sea, indicates a milder warm climate. Consequently, the influence of transgressions on climatic zoning noted deep in the north, in Iceland (Einarsson, 1957;Gladenkov, 1978), in the African-Arabian region was probably not so significant. Here, migration restrictions during the movement of ancient hominin from Africa to Eurasia were determined rather not by the climate, but by the peculiarities of paleogeography. We tried to check this proposition on a specially compiled tectonic-paleogeographic map (Figure 8).

Discussion and Conclusions
According to tectonic-paleogeographic mapping data (Figure 8), the Levantine Corridor is a rather exotic landscape-geodynamic structure and a migration ecosystem of a narrowly channeled type. It is sandwiched between two linear zones, one of which is purely paleogeographic (from the northern part of the Nile estuary in the south to the Levantine coast in the north), and the second has a pronounced geodynamic character and is an extremely active planetary strike-slip zone. The echoes of the movements of this longdeveloping Eastern Mediterranean Nubian Belt  extend from the high plateaus of the Eastern Desert of Egypt, formed by the island-arc and ophiolite complex of the Neoproterozoic, extending far to the north, into the Alpine region of the Eurasian lithospheric plate. This belt forms the western part of the Caucasian-Arabian syntaxis (Sharkov, 2019). The latter is an arcuate zone of accretionary intrusion of the extended Indian plate into the Eurasian one. In the DST belt, intense seismicity and intense shear tectonics are developed with the formation of numerous rhomboid graben-like troughs (pull-apart basins) in the zones of the Gulf of Aqaba, Arava Valley, the Dead Sea area in the south, and basins of Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), Hula, and El Gab in the north Krasheninnikov et al., 2005).
Thermal springs and active Pliocene-Quaternary trap magmatism and volcanism are developed in this zone (Figures 5 and 8) in the zone of intersection with the diagonal fields of tectonothermal activation of the Arabian Plate (Eppelbaum et al., 2004(Eppelbaum et al., , 2007Eppelbaum andKatz, 2015a, 2021). Obviously, such processes actively influenced the formation of the relief, hydrographic elements, and the nature of the microclimate and the dynamics of the landscape of this unique narrow zone, close to the coast of the Pliocene-Quaternary Neotethys-Mediterranean basin. The DST area appears to be a significant constraint on the dispersal of ancient hominin (Ben-Avraham et al., 2005).
The fact that it was precisely at the boundary between Calabrian and Pleistocene (800-900 thousand years ago), that intensive movements took place in the marginal zone of the carbonate platform can be seen in the Gush Dan area (Big Tel Aviv, Israel), on the border of the Pleshet terranes and the raised plateau of the Judea-Samaria terrane ( Figure   8). Here, north of the city of Rosh Ain, there are developed near-fault folds in Cretaceous limestones and fractured zones filled with Calabrian red sands. There are no such formations to the west of Mt. Carmel. The age of the terraces of the youngest fault step with marks up to 35 m does not exceed 300 thousand years, as evidenced by the marine terraces with the remains of mollusks and large foraminifera (Michelson, 1971).
The data of sin-sedimentation tectonics of the Neogene-Quaternary stage (Figure 9) of the Eastern Mediterranean region (Eppelbaum and Katz, 2015a)  Optimal landscapes for habitation are partly developed in the northern part of the DST. The analysis of sin-sedimentation tectonics leads to an unambiguous conviction about the complexity of the structure, the diversity of landscape, and the narrowness of the optimal ecological niches within the Eastern Mediterranean and the youth of the formation of the ecosystem of the Levantine Corridor. From the east and south, it was adjoined by an arid zone of a vast rocky desert. This factor cannot but be taken into account when analyzing the features of migration and settlement of ancient people.
Summing up the above, we come to the conviction that the Levantine Corridor in the era of the early hominin development in the area of East Africa had not yet formed as an optimal landscape-migration zone, either tectonically or paleogeographically. The dissection of the coastal high plateau of the Eastern Mediterranean with the formation of optimal land landscapes for the habitation of ancient people began after regression at the end of Middle Gelasian two million years ago when the sea level dropped by 200 m. This concept seems to be consistent with the age of the Pliocene artifacts. On the other hand, this concept sets out a new strategy for finding them. If new data is discovered, this approach can be confirmed or significantly adjusted. However, it is obvious that taking into account the diverse complex aspects of the migration of hominin from Africa to Eurasia in this complex region will have to be in a wider range.
Thus, the following main conclusions can be formulated:

1.
For the first time, attention was paid to the discrete nature of the migration area of ancient people from Africa to Eurasia.