Posted on 07/20/2006 3:55:53 PM PDT by Marius3188
At the end of the last Ice Age, the Sahara Desert was just as dry and uninviting as it is today. But sandwiched between two periods of extreme dryness were a few millennia of plentiful rainfall and lush vegetation.
During these few thousand years, prehistoric humans left the congested Nile Valley and established settlements around rain pools, green valleys, and rivers.
The ancient climate shift and its effects are detailed in the July 21 issue of the journal Science.
When the rains came
Some 12,000 years ago, the only place to live along the eastern Sahara Desert was the Nile Valley. Being so crowded, prime real estate in the Nile Valley was difficult to come by. Disputes over land were often settled with the fist, as evidenced by the cemetery of Jebel Sahaba where many of the buried individuals had died a violent death.
But around 10,500 years ago, a sudden burst of monsoon rains over the vast desert transformed the region into habitable land.
This opened the door for humans to move into the area, as evidenced by the researcher's 500 new radiocarbon dates of human and animal remains from more than 150 excavation sites.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
BTW, perhaps this will also describe how the Sahara has Crocs in it.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/06/0617_020618_croc.html
Hopefully this will help in the dating of the Sphinx..water ping
and now it's not cause of Global Warming which is all George Bush's fault! --Albert Gore
Ah, the good old days.
/h
Yes. It was a pre-historic golf resort and jungle area. That is until my wife (old 'brown thumb') became the caretaker.
It's Bush's fault.
SUVs?
ping
Many parts of the world were greener than they are. The Romans did serious deforestation when they arrived in various colonies (such as Spain). And Al Gore wasn't even a gleam in his father's eye...
Red dots are human habitatations
Amazing, so that could date the Sphinx at more than 5000 years old? Wouldn't that also indicate the existence of advanced civilizations prior to the Mesopotamians and Indus River Civilizations? Exciting.
I'm curious to know the positions, locations, and condition of the human remains found there.
I would hope so, probably close to 12,000 years old or older.
Have you read anything about the temple in Yonaguni Jaban? It has been estimated to be over eight thousand years old. As it was built while the land was dry, which was over eight thousand yaers ago.
The beginning of the end of the last Ice Age.
Climate History
"The climate of the Sahara has undergone enormous variation between wet and dry over the last few hundred thousand years. During the last ice age, the Sahara was bigger than it is today, extending south beyond its current boundaries[1]. The end of the ice age brought wetter times to the Sahara, from about 8000 BCE to 6000 BCE, perhaps due to low pressure areas over the collapsing ice sheets to the north[2]."
"Once the ice sheets were gone, the northern part of the Sahara dried out. However, not long after the end of the ice sheets, the monsoon which currently brings rain to the Sahel came further north and counteracted the drying trend in the southern Sahara. The monsoon in Africa (and elsewhere) is due to heating during the summer. Air over land becomes warmer and rises, pulling cool wet air in from the ocean. This causes rain. So, paradoxically, the Sahara was wetter when it recieved more insolation in the summer. In turn, changes in solar insolation are caused by changes in the Earth's orbital parameters."
"By around 2500 BCE, the monsoon retreated south to approximately where it is today[3], leading to the desertification of the Sahara. The Sahara is currently as dry as it was about 13,000 years ago.[4]
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