The Friday Fillip
As winter sets in, all grey and grim, it’s natural, I think, to find your thoughts wandering to warmer climes, or, if you’re nostalgic, warmer times. Well say no more. Today’s fillip does the work for you, taking you to a place (very) long ago and (very) far away.
The place: the Ténéré desert in what is now Niger. The time: oh, about 9,000 years ago.
And the way there (and thence) is photographs. Photographer Mike Hettwer went with an archeological expedition to Gobero, where once the Sahara was wet and hippos roamed the mud. They uncovered evidence not only of marvellous animal life — from dinosaurs to giraffes — but also of stone age human life, even more marvellous in its way.
Hettwer’s pictures are available on a number of sites, but I’ll point you first to that of Boston.com, which hosted 17 of his lovely images in an easily accessible way. The most impressive image for me (a really hard choice) was number 11, an 8,000 year old petroglyph of a tamed giraffe.
National Geographic ran a story about the expedition called The Green Sahara, and there you’ll find the same photos and a few that aren’t on the Boston.com site. As well, there’s a video where members of the expedition talk a bit about what they’re doing. As well you can find these images on Mike Hettwer’s own site, along with more of his photographs.
Now because I’m an academic, I have to give you the opportunity to do some follow-up reading: The scientists on the expedition have published a surprisingly accessible article about their findings, “Lakeside Cemeteries in the Sahara: 5000 Years of Holocene Population and Environmental Change” which is available in full text, along with good illustrations, on PLoS ONE. If you read any of the material in the various places where the photos are published you’ll learn that the Sahara got wet for those 8,000 years because the Earth shifted its orbit a bit. These shifts, which have brought us the ice ages, are known as the Milankovitch cycles, and you can learn about them on Wikipedia. Finally, if the Sahara proves to be your thing, you might like to read a great book by Canadian writers Marq De Villiers and Sheila Hirtle called simply Sahara.
I’ve always found Saharan climatology to be fascinating for another reason – it demonstrates how dramatically the face of our Earth can shift and its effects on human populations. There are some theories that the desertification of the Sahara is what led to the mass exodus of people to settle the Nile, creating the first major civilization in history. Traces of these early Saharan populations have even been found as far as parts of Western Europe, even before the migration of Ibero-Celtic/Indo-European populations that arrived there from Central Asia.
But the Sahara has relevance to contemporary human migrations as well. Its spread along the eastern border over the past couple decades has turned lush pastoral grazing lands into arid desert, forcing these nomads to seek land elsewhere. They arrived in a land settled by the Fur people, leading to conflicts between local agriculturalists and displaced pastoralists, and creating the backdrop for the political crisis in the Sudan.
Perhaps even more fascinating is that when the planet does self-correct from global warming (as it inevitably will in the long-term) and the ice caps expand, the Sahara will likely again return to lush green valleys and rivers. Let’s hope by that time there is enough wildlife in the world to ensure that human populations are not the only ones to witness this miraculous rebirth.