Green Sahara–African cultures

What time period?
From 10,000-15,000 years ago to 5,500 years ago

Why was the area habitable?
Heavy rains

Who lived in that space?
Animals, including humans, that typically inhabit savannah or grassland areas

Why did this occur?
African Humid Period

How did the northern hemisphere shift position?
In addition to rotating on an axis, the earth also wobbles

How long is the entire cycle of one wobble?
Approximately 40,000 years

How often does the wobble bring the north closer to the sun than the south?
Approximately every 26,000 years

How do we know that animals and humans lived in this area at that time?
Rock art and archaeology

What animals are depicted in rock art of the Green Sahara?
Water buffalo, antelope, crocodiles, elephants, hippopotami, giraffes, and many others

What does the rock art tell us about humans?
The widespread nature of the art shows us how widespread human habitation was across the Green Sahara.

When is the rock art dated to?
Between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago

What other evidence is there from the Green Sahara?
Archaeological evidence of human communities

What evidence of human habitation have archaeologists found?
Worked stone objects such as arrowhead, jewelry, harpoon heads, and fish hooks

What does the archaeological evidence tell us about humans?
The find spots show us where humans lived, the harpoon heads and fish hooks indicate that aquatic animals were found in the area, and the animal remains show what animals lived in that area.

What other evidence have archaeologists found?
Burial remains of humans and skeletal remains of animals that typically live in grasslands

What other archaeological evidence is there from the Green Sahara?
Pottery

How do the Neolithic sites relate to later sites in the Nile Valley?
Many pottery types found at these Neolithic sites are also found at later predynastic Egyptian and Nubian Neolithic and A-Group sites.

How early are those Neolithic ceramics dated?
We first see these pottery types in the west and south of the Nile Valley in the sixth millennium (c. 6000–5000 BCE), and they only appear in the northern Nile Valley later, in the fourth millennium (c. 4000–3000 BCE, the predynastic or Badarian period).

What does that mean?
Humans were interacting with each other from at least as far south as the Sixth Cataract of the Nile (north of modern Khartoum, Sudan) to the southern part of modern Egypt, and many older traditions of pottery making moved from south to north.

What other evidence is there from the Green Sahara?
Lakes and megalakes!

What are examples of the Green Sahara’s widespread culture?
Burial traditions, economies of cattle pastoralism and harvesting wild grain, and objects such as pottery, hair combs, stone maceheads, and stone palettes

What evidence of Green Sahara African cultures is found in the Nile Valley?
Toward the end of the Neolithic (c. 7000-6000 years ago), humans lived in seasonal camps along the Nile while herding, fishing, and gathering food. From burial items such as cosmetics, jewelry, combs, and palettes for grinding paint, we see that body decoration was widely practiced. Stone maceheads and pottery-making traditions first appear in the southern and later in the northern Nile Valley.

When does that culture end?
Archaeologists do not see a break or a rupture in the widespread culture of the Green Sahara and the time of the earliest rulers of the Nile Valley

So what does that mean?
Many cultural traditions of the predynastic period in the northern Nile Valley began in the southern Nile Valley or in areas to the east and west of the valley. The predynastic and early dynastic cultures of the ancient Nile Valley are firmly rooted in the cultural traditions of the Green Sahara. They are African cultures.

How long did it stay wet in the southern Nile Valley?
There were still prolonged periods of rain in what is today Sudan in the second millennium (c. 1000 BCE).

How long did it stay wet in the northern Nile Valley?
There were still prolonged periods of rain in the southern part of what is today Egypt in the mid-fourth millennium (c. 3500 BCE).

What are some occupation sites from this era?
Laqiya, Wadi Howar, Uweinat, and Gilf Kebir, just to name a few

So what does that mean for the people who lived there?
As parts of the environment slowly dried, people continued moving and interacting along the Nile River Valley and in the areas east and west of it.