I dunno, this feels like confusing correlation with causation to me. Maybe the lake dried up, all the Homo Erectus left, and when it got better again their replacement Home Sapiens came along. I'm not seeing a compelling link between the drying lake and evolution here.
The team pieced together temporal data from the sediment core and the Olorgesailie archaeological record to show that early in the aridification period, around 500,000 years ago, local large grazing animals started to go extinct. Around the same time, the primitive, pear-shaped Acheulean hand-axes usually wielded by Homo erectus stopped appearing. Life, it seems, took a turn for the worse, leaving a void in the archaeological record.
But fast-forward to about 320,000 years ago, and the world changes again. Lake Magadi’s intense early drying period has ended. Finer, sharper tools — the varied, delicate precursors to spears, arrows, and fish hooks — show up at Olorgesailie, as a breakthrough Science paper showed in March. The tools are a huge upgrade from the chunky hand-axes of Homo erectus, which were the only technology that hominins from Africa to Eurasia used for over a million years. This new, so-called “Middle Stone Age toolkit” is made from a variety of rock types, suggesting that whoever made them was capable of traveling greater distances.
“Together,” says Owen, “the evidence suggests an advance in cognitive abilities.” We can’t definitively identify the Homo species that made these new tools, but paleoanthropologists can’t help but notice that they just happened to appear around the same time that history-changing events were ongoing in present-day Morocco.
“Although very distant from Olorgesailie this does suggest they could have been present at Olorgesailie when the Middle Stone Age tools first appeared in the study region, so it is possible (though not proven) that H. erectus were replaced by H. sapiens,” says Owen.
“There’s no smoking gun that we can say definitely that modern Homo sapiens was the only one that was capable of making these things,” adds Cohen, “but the timing is sure suspicious about that.”
https://www.inverse.com/article/49693-lake-magadi-sediment-cores-linked-to-human-history
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