9700 to 5500 BCE · Africanspan
A lake six hundred kilometres long once sat where the Sahara is
›Read the full entryClose
In the early Holocene the tropical African rain belt pushed north to the middle of the Sahara while the Mediterranean winter rains pushed south to meet it, and the desert turned green. Rivers ran off the Tibesti and Hoggar massifs and filled at least two great bodies of fresh water: Lake Fitri, and Lake Mega-Chad, which stretched well over six hundred kilometres from the site of the present Lake Chad north to the Tibesti. Early Nilo-Saharan speakers moved west out of the Nile country along these new waterways, and by the ninth millennium BCE they were working the shores of Mega-Chad with an intensive foraging economy built on large fish such as Nile perch and on hunting hippopotamus. The archaeologist J. E. G. Sutton named this the Aquatic Civilization of Middle Africa. It fed communities across a continental span for thousands of years, then vanished under the sand, leaving harpoon points, fish bones and the languages of the people who built it.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.