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Gareth Morgan - Saharan Climate Change |
We’ve spent the last week riding through Egypt’s Western Desert – that part of the Sahara bordered by the Nile on its east and the Libyan border to the West. Prior to setting out on the crescent-shaped oases route that links Luxor with Cairo we took time to visit the first of our Pharaonic sites, the tomb of Ramses II who in the true Pharaonic tradition of self-worship built himself a tomb at Abu Simbel, now lying beneath Lake Nasser. UNESCO moved the site above the water line, and it is pretty well unsurpassed as a spectacular exhibition of how self-indulgent the rulers of that civilisation were. Still these are the Egyptians that gave us writing and so from a Eurocentric perspective, defined where history began!
But the more interesting sites in this locale lies 100 kms to the west in the arid expanse of the Sahara. They are the archaeological sites of Nabta Playa which confirm that people were living and raising domesticated cattle in these environs in the 9th millennium BC, 5,000 years before the “prehistoric” period ended. They also manufactured ornately adorned ceramics and there’s evidence these prehistoric peoples had their own religious mythology based around cattle sacrifice.
History and prehistory of the Sahara also points to dramatic changes in the climatic conditions and vegetative environment. Since homo sapiens existed (from around 160,000 years ago) there has been one glaciation period – where average global temperatures fall some 5 degrees below the 15 degrees average of the last 50 years, and these cycles have tended to be about 100,000 years apart. If we consider then the last half million years there’ve been four or five and that is sufficient to have seen the Sahara change from savannah to desert and back and back again.
Prior to 8500 BC the Sahara was as desolate as it is now. But then monsoon rains swept across it and a savannah (grasslands) period commenced. Giraffes, elephants and lions roamed these now arid and barren lands from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and Nile valley dwellers moved out into the grasslands and established settlements with domestication of sheep and goats as well as cropping the major activities. It’s hard to imagine this level of occupation given how barren the area is now. It was from 3500 BC that desiccation of Egypt’s slice of the Sahara set in again and saw the population return to the Nile Valley and the Pharaonic Age begin with its urbanisation along the Nile. For us of European lineage we blithely regard that as the beginning of history, certainly of “civilisation” – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The earliest humans in the area were Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, who lived here between about 400,000 and 70,000 years ago. They survived by hunting large and small game in a landscape that was considerably wetter and greener than it is now. A prolonged arid phase from about 70,000 to 12,000 years ago apparently drove humans out of the region, but then the rains returned – as described above – along with the people, who this time settled around oases and developed deep well storage techniques to store water.
Neither are we that far from the Awash district of Ethiopia, referred to in an earlier article in this series as where “Lucy” and other specimens from the Australopithecines bipedal genus – forerunner of the homo-erectus and homo-sapien genii – have been uncovered. It’s too hard to believe that there is no link between these ancient inhabitations that have been evidenced in the Sahara with those that existed in the same proximate area, and manufactured their own tools, many millennia earlier.
And I ask again where on earth does this scientific work render the modern day religious mythologies and ritualistic submission that Christianity and Islam or any other religious cult for that matter, promulgate? To the realm of children’s fairy tales one can only surmise or more cynically to the inventory of devices invented by men simply to control other men.
Ramadan ended here today. What a farce of mass hysteria.
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