The grass is always greener on the other side (of the Holocene). What is today a vast and inhospitable home to many people and creatures was, between ten and five thousand years ago, a lush environment replete with lakes, forests, and grasses. We examine the first clues that suggested a Green Sahara to researchers, explore the technologies and societies that lived there, and contemplate what the Sahara’s past might suggest about its future.

Links

• Megalakes in the Sahara? A Review (Quaternary Research)
• Saharan Dust Blows Across the Atlantic (NOAA)
• The emergence of pottery in Africa during the tenth millennium cal BC : new evidence from Ounjougou (Mali) (Antiquity)
• Ounjougou
• Technological and Cultural Change Among the Last Hunter-Gatherers of the Maghreb: The Capsian (10,000–6000 B.P.) (Journal of World Prehistory)
• Capsian (Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archaeology)
• The 8,000-year-old dugout canoe from Dufuna (NE Nigeria)
• Africa’s oldest boat set for exhibit in Nigeria (Africa Times)
• First dairying in green Saharan Africa in the fifth millennium BC (Nature)
• History of the Domestication of Cows and Yaks (ThoughtCo)
• Chad Genetic Diversity Reveals an African History Marked by Multiple Holocene Eurasian Migrations (American Journal of Human Genetics)
• End of the African Humid Period (NOAA)
• End of the African Humid Period (Nature)
• Climate Change in North Africa: The Past is Not the Future (Climatic Change)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast

Affiliates

• Wildnote
• TeePublic
• Timeular