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Photo of a (currently) dry, dusty cave south of the Atlas mountains. In the past, water was flowing down this large stalagmite formation. We date tiny pieces of stalagmite (~0.25g) to establish when the cave was wet in the past. Credit: Ben Lovett Analysis of Moroccan stalagmites reveals that the Sahara received increased rainfall between 8,700 and 4,300 years ago, supporting early herding societies. This rainfall, likely driven by tropical plumes and monsoon expansion, narrowed the desert, improved habitability, and facilitated human movement. Analysis of stalagmite samples from caves in southern Morocco has revealed new details about past rainfall patterns...

The lush green Sahara by Mike Oard Posted 9-20-2021 The Sahara Desert of northern Africa is one of the driest and hottest locations on Earth (figure 1). In the eastern Sahara, it rains only once every 30 to 50 years. The Sahara Desert covers about 9,200,000 km2 (3,600,000 sq mi), comparable to the size of the entire USA. It is divided into several regions, sometimes by high mountain ranges such as the Ahaggar and Tibesti Mountains (figure 2). Some 74% of the Sahara is covered by sand, with several large ‘sand seas’, such as the Great Sand Sea of eastern...

Wet spells in the Sahara may have opened the door for early human migration. According to new evidence, water-dependent trees and shrubs grew there between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago. This suggests that changes in the weather helped early humans cross the desert on their way out of Africa... While about 40 per cent of hydrocarbons in today's dust come from water-dependent plants, this rose to 60 per cent, first between 120,000 and 110,000 ago and again from 50,000 to 45,000 years ago. So the region seemed to be in the grip of unusually wet spells at the time. That...

African Ice Core Analysis Reveals Catastrophic Droughts, Shrinking Ice Fields, Civilization Shifts COLUMBUS, Ohio – A detailed analysis of six cores retrieved from the rapidly shrinking ice fields atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro shows that those tropical glaciers began to form about 11,700 years ago. The cores also yielded remarkable evidence of three catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropics 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago. Lastly, the analysis also supports Ohio State University researchers' prediction that these unique bodies of ice will disappear in the next two decades, the victims of global warming. These findings were published today in the journal...

Fish may have once swum across the Sahara, a finding that could shed light on how humanity made its way out of Africa, researchers said. The cradle of humanity lies south of the Sahara, which begs the question as to how our species made its way past it. The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, and would seem a major barrier for any humans striving to migrate off the continent. Scientists have often focused on the Nile Valley as the corridor by which humans left Africa. However, considerable research efforts have failed to uncover evidence for its...

The Sahara, the world's largest desert, was once fertile grassland. This fact has been common knowledge in the scientific community for some time, but scientists are still grappling with historic data to determine whether that transition took place abruptly or gradually. At the European Geosciences Union General Assembly held in Vienna, Austria earlier this year, researchers presented new evidence showing that the eastern region of the Sahara desert, particularly the area near Lake Yoa in Chad, dried up slowly and progressively since the mid-Holocene period.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A US-led team of archaeologists said Thursday they had discovered by chance what is believed to be the largest find of Stone Age-era remains ever uncovered in the Sahara Desert. Named Gobero, the site includes remarkably intact human remains as well as the skeletons of fish and crocodiles dating back some 10,000 years to a time when what is now the world's largest desert was a swampy wetland.

A team of US archaeologists has discovered the ruins of a city dating back to the period of the first farmers 7,000 years ago in Egypt's Fayyum oasis, the supreme council of antiquities said. "An electro-magnetic survey revealed the existence in the Karanis region of a network of walls and roads similar to those constructed during the Greco-Roman period," the council's chief Zahi Hawwas said. The remnants of the city are "still buried beneath the sand and the details of this discovery will be revealed in due course," Mr Hawwas said. "The artefacts consist of the remains of walls and...

Egypt's Earliest Agricultural Settlement UnearthedA fragment of a bangle made of a shell found only at the Red Sea suggests possible trade links with the cradle of agriculture in the Near East. (Credit: Copyright UC Regents) ScienceDaily (Feb. 15, 2008) — Archaeologists from UCLA and the University of Groningen (RUG) in the Netherlands have found the earliest evidence ever discovered of an ancient Egyptian agricultural settlement, including farmed grains, remains of domesticated animals, pits for cooking and even floors for what appear to be dwellings. The findings, which were unearthed in 2006 and are still being analyzed, also suggest possible...

The Tassili n’Ajjer of Southern Algiers is described as the “largest storehouse of rock paintings in the world”. But could it also be the origins of the ancient Egypt culture ? In January 2003, I made enquiries to visit the Hoggar Mountains and the Tassili n’Ajjer, one of the most enchanting mountain ranges on this planet. The two geographically close but nevertheless quite separate landscapes are located in the Sahara desert in southeast Algeria. I was told that if I could pack my bags immediately (literally), I could join the three weeks’ trip. Unfortunately, I could not, but planned to...

When Paul C. Sereno went hunting for dinosaur bones in the Sahara, his career took a sharp turn from paleontology to archaeology. The expedition found what has proved to be the largest known graveyard of Stone Age people who lived there when the desert was green. The first traces of pottery, stone tools and human skeletons were discovered eight years ago at a site in the southern Sahara, in Niger. After preliminary research, Dr. Sereno, a University of Chicago scientist who had previously uncovered remains of the dinosaur Nigersaurus there, organized an international team of archaeologists to investigate what had...

Graves Found From Sahara’s Green Period By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD When Paul C. Sereno went hunting for dinosaur bones in the Sahara, his career took a sharp turn from paleontology to archaeology. The expedition found what has proved to be the largest known graveyard of Stone Age people who lived there when the desert was green. The first traces of pottery, stone tools and human skeletons were discovered eight years ago at a site in the southern Sahara, in Niger. After preliminary research, Dr. Sereno, a University of Chicago scientist who had previously uncovered remains of the dinosaur Nigersaurus there,...

In search of the lost Sahara 05/15/2008 A team of Basque and Sahrawi archaeologists is making the first catalogue of the prehistoric heritage of the Western Sahara. Archaeologists doing some research. Photo: EiTBThe region of Tiris, a vast desert area south of Western Sahara, is the work field of the Basque-Sahrawi expedirion researching the past of this inhospitable place of the planet. A team of Basque archaeologists led by Andoni Sáenz de Buruaga, a professor at the Basque public university UPV, is visiting the Western Sahara for a fifth time. "We presented our research project to the Sahrawi Government in...

Once Lush Sahara Dried Up Over Millennia, Study SaysJames Owen for National Geographic NewsMay 8, 2008 The grassy prehistoric Sahara turned into Earth's largest hot desert more slowly than previously thought, a new report says—and some say global warming may turn the desert green once again. The new research is based on deposits from a unique desert lake in remote northern Chad. Lake Yoa, sustained by prehistoric groundwater, has survived for millennia despite constant drought and searing heat. The body of water contains an unbroken climate record going back at least 6,000 years, said study lead author Stefan Kröpelin of...

OSLO (Reuters) - The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes. And there are now signs of a tiny shift back towards greener conditions in parts of the Sahara, apparently because of OSLO (Reuters) - The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes. And there are now signs of a...

Spectacular prehistoric depictions of animal and human figures created up to 6,000 years ago on Western Saharan rocks have been vandalised by United Nations peacekeepers, The Times has learnt. Archaeological sites boasting ancient paintings and engravings of giraffes, buffalo and elephants have been defaced within the past two years by personnel attached to the UN mission, known by its French acronym, Minurso. Graffiti, some of it more than a metre high and sprayed with paint meant for use for marking routes, now blights the rock art at Lajuad, an isolated site known as Devil Mountain, which is regarded by the...

The pharaohs of ancient Egypt owed their existence to prehistoric climate change in the eastern Sahara, according to an exhaustive study of archaeological data that bolsters this theory. Starting at about 8500 B.C., researchers say, broad swaths of what are now Egypt, Chad, Libya, and Sudan experienced a "sudden onset of humid conditions." ...The new study, which appears online today on the Science Express Web site, is based on painstaking research that combines new radiocarbon dating of about 500 artifacts from the region with data from past studies. Kröpelin and study co-author Rudolph Kuper also collected geological climate data from...

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...

The Sahara has not always been the arid, inhospitable place that it is today – it was once a savannah teeming with life, according to researchers at the Universities of Reading and Leicester. Eight years of studies in the Libyan desert area of Fazzan, now one of the harshest, most inaccessible spots on Earth, have revealed swings in its climate that have caused considerably wetter periods, lasting for thousands of years, when the desert turned to savannah and lakes provided water for people and animals. This, in turn, has given us vital clues about the history of humans in the...

Stone Age Cemetery, Artifacts Unearthed in Sahara Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News October 21, 2005Archaeologists have excavated a trove of Stone Age human skeletons and artifacts on the shores of an ancient lake in the Sahara. The seven nearby sites include an extensive cemetery and represent one of the largest and best preserved concentrations of ancient skeletons and artifacts ever found in the region, researchers say. Harpoons, fishhooks, pottery, jewelry, stone tools, and other artifacts pepper the ancient lakeside settlement. The objects were left by early communities that once thrived on the former lake's abundant fish and shellfish. "They...