4,000 years ago the Sahara was not yet a desert. We have found the new evidence in a cave in Sudan

The Sahara Desert is the largest of the hot deserts in the world and one of the largest globally. However, we have known for some time that this was not always the case: there was a time when the Sahara was a veritable garden.

But until when?

Paintings. The new clue about how the Sahara Desert transitioned to what it is today is not in complex paleoclimatic models, but in some cave paintings. These are 4,000-year-old paintings discovered in eastern Sudan.

The paintings show, among other things, cattle, and this is where the key to the discovery lies: this type of cattle could not have survived in current climatic conditions.

“It was enigmatic to find cattle etched into desert stone walls, as they require abundant water and acres of grass, and would not have survived in the dry, arid environment of today’s Sahara,” stated in a press release Julien Cooper, member of the team responsible for the discovery.

Orchard or savannah… It is estimated that the (last) humid period of the Sahara It began about 15,000 years ago and would have ended about 5,000 years ago. This idea is based on both the archaeological record and paleoclimatic models, which try to simulate how the climate evolved in prehistory.

The cave paintings show what the team has identified as a savannah, with pools, rivers, swamps and other aquatic features that would have facilitated the work of the shepherds of this type of livestock during the 2nd and 3rd millennia BCE. The paintings also show their own fauna. of the African savanna such as giraffes and elephants.

…and from there to the desert. But the “green Sahara” would soon come to an end. The rains began to disappear, turning the region into one of the driest in the world. As those responsible for the study explain, lakes and rivers began to dry up and sand began to cover the grasses.

At this point, the inhabitants had to migrate towards the Nile Valley to find places to graze. “The Atbai desert around Wadi Halfa, where the new rock art was discovered, was practically depopulated. For those who stayed, cattle were abandoned in favor of sheep and goats,” explains Cooper.

4,000 years ago. The discovery is based on a series of cave paintings, 16 in total, found in Wadi Halfa, eastern Sudan, between 2018 and 2019. The punctures were dated 4,000 years ago. The details of your study were featured in the magazine Journal of Egyptian Archeology.

These paintings are not the first archaeological evidence that shows us this other side of the African desert, from Sudan to Morocco there are various signs that point in this direction. According to Cooper himself,the inhabitants of the region would have adopted the livestock practice of the inhabitants of the Nile Valley and the Middle East region between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago.

It is possible, the expert explains, that the relationship between humans and livestock would have gone beyond the economic and would have had cultural significance. One idea is based on the decorations and deformations seen in the art studied by the team.

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Image | Cooper & Vanhulle, 2024.