As recently as 5,000 years ago, the Sahara—today a vast desert in northern Africa, spanning more than 3.5 million square miles—was a verdant landscape, with sprawling vegetation and numerous lakes. Ancient cave paintings in the region depict hippos in watering holes, and roving herds of elephants and giraffes—a vibrant contrast with today's barren, inhospitable terrain. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-abrupt-widespread-climate-shift-sahara.html#jCp
Yeah.. I did not think the Egyptian culture thrived for many thousands of years in the desert as it is now. They also say the NILE had branches west into the Barren regions.
Actually, Egyptian civilization was not founded until after the desertification of the Sahara. In fact, the Neolithic Revolution itself (the shift from nomadic hunter-gatherers to permanent farming villages) happened there around 6000BCE, as the climate was changing. It's likely that the Egyptians had to invent farming and animal husbandry (the twin technologies that comprise agriculture) specifically because the land was drying up. As traditional wild sources of food shrank because of the drought, they needed irrigation to grow enough crops to feed everybody, and they needed domesticated animals that could be herded on the pasture lands created by irrigation. The building of cities ("civilization") was the second Paradigm Shift after agriculture. Desertification was already well under way. There was a massive population shift from dessicated North Africa to the southern part of the continent, leaving Egyptian civilizations separated by a desert from the tribes of sub-Saharan Africa, many of which remained hunter-gatherers for a rather long time. Egypt soon advanced into the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age, and effectively became part of the Europe-Mesopotamia cultural and political sphere. DNA analysis shows that all non-African humans are descended from the San (or "Bushmen"), the first tribe to successfully migrate out of Africa ca. 60,000BCE. In those days they simply crossed the narrow Red Sea into Asia, using Stone Age boat-building technology. But today the San homeland is way down near the southern tip of Africa, because of the population shift caused by desertification.
Have you heard of the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis? The Sphinx water erosion hypothesis contends that the main type of weathering evident on the enclosure walls of the Great Sphinx could only have been caused by prolonged and extensive rainfall,[20] and that it must therefore predate the time of the pharaoh Khafra. The hypothesis is championed primarily by Robert M. Schoch, a geologist and associate professor of natural science at the College of General Studies at Boston University, and John Anthony West, an author and alternative Egyptologist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sphinx_of_Giza
I don't buy it. The head and feet were attached to a preexisting limstone outcrop. The weathering on the outcrop is erroded from the earlier wet period but the feet and the head show much less errosion.
