Saharan Prehistory

The full and untold story of human evolution is a tantalizing mystery that may never be truly known.

I spent the fall and winter studying the movement of modern humans, formerly known as Cro-Magnons, as they survived a 30,000 year period of occupation on the European continent during a time of glacial maximum, from about 45,000 years ago to about 15,000 years ago.  I think of these people as my ancestors in a psychological sense, if not in a direct or strict genetic descent.  

And what I took away was the simple insight that they were an indigenous species, with perhaps much the same orientation to the world and life that indigenous peoples continue to hold today.  That's an important thought to me, in this day of rampant, runaway global culture hell-bent on destroying a planet it sees as nothing more than fodder, grist for its money-making mill.  I'm talking about the effects of the imperialistic European mindset that has dominated the past 500 years.  We didn't always have this approach or orientation to life.  Yes, capitalism may be just another form of colonial conquest.  And no, I'm not a Marxist.  I'm an evolutionist.

I want to know where we went wrong -- when did we shift from our original indigenous mindset to the toxic one we hold today?  I hope to examine that question more fully in the future.

An initial shift appears to have begun in the waning millenia of the Ice Age's freezing grip upon the world, in the years from about 15,000 to about 12,000 years before the present, just prior to a massive global warming.  A climatic and human transition seems to have already been in effect.  As this video states, the return of a more humid climate in northern Africa and the Mediterranean gave birth to a relatively stable and somewhat sedentary human culture which was still largely comprised of hunter gatherers, but now had a new emphasis upon gathering the grains that, domesticated, would become one of the foundational cornerstones of the more settled human culture that eventually evolved.

As the video states, in these years vegetation spread over almost the entire Sahara, a vast savannah of grass, shrubs and trees.  Lakes and rivers expanded and animals moved back into the region.  Humans, of course, followed the migration of animals there.  An evolutionary jump in the form of weapons fashioned took place at this time in the Sahara.  Cave and rock art appeared, as did forms of portable art.  Depictions on cave walls show humans swimming along with many other forms of animals -- in the Sahara, as recently as 12,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Agriculture and animal husbandry appear not to have entered the Sahara until sometime after 7,000 years ago, which is when it also began to move across continental Europe, although its appearance in the Levant came somewhat earlier.  Cattle were domesticated in northern Africa, which provided a form of wealth and may be when social distinctions based upon the control of that wealth and the power it endowed also became a lasting element of human life.  Wealth rather than skill became a dynamic in the evolving cultural ethic.

The gradual drying of the Sahara may have induced people to begin to congregate along the Nile and set the scene for the further development of culture along that watery lifeline.  This gathering of humans along rivers also began to happen elsewhere on the globe at this time, indicating another climatic change to which humans were forced to adapt.

So, a glimpse of the transition post-Ice Age as it happened in the Sahara.