Mochena Borago

Mochena Borago is a rockshelter and archaeological site situated on the western slope of Mount Damota, nearest to the town of Wolaita Sodo in Ethiopia, located in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region. The site is well-dated, with 59 radiocarbon dates, which gives it one of the most secure chronologies among Late Pleistocene sites in the Horn of Africa and Eastern Africa. It is one of only a few African sites found with intact deposits dating to Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 3 outside of South Africa, and was potentially a refugium for hunter-gatherering peoples during the cold and arid period of MIS 4. This makes it an important research site for testing the "refugium theory," which states that over the past 70,000 years, during cold, arid conditions, like those of the Last Glacial Maximum and MIS 4, humans sought refuge in the mountains of the southwest Ethiopian Highlands, which received higher rainfall, making them more habitable than the surrounding areas. Research at Mochena Borago is helping to reconstruct human behavior during the Late Pleistocene, and the paleoenvironment that Homo sapiens would have inhabited at this time in the Horn of Africa.

Ecology

Mount Damota, which is a trachytic volcano, is currently dormant, and rises 2908 meters above sea level at its summit. It was last active from around 2.94 million years ago to the Late Quaternary. The volcano's coordinates are 6°54′12.9″N 37°46′45.8″E. Damota touches the administrative capital of the Wolaita Zone, Sodo, at its southern foot, and it lies between the Southwest Ethiopian Highlands and the Ethiopian Rift Valley from west to east, and between the central Rift Valley lakes and Bilate River from north to south. The rockshelter itself is about 70 m wide, 12 m high, and around 20 m from the east wall to the waterfall located at the mouth of the site to the west. It has an area of around 600m², and is located at 2300m asl.