The Wet Sahara

Alice C. Linsley

There once was a seabed flowing through the Sahara. Fossils indicate that the sea supported the largest sea snakes and catfish that ever lived. This was the home of the Proto-Saharan populations, peoples who shared many common beliefs, customs and symbols. Their civilization was at its peak between 10,000 and 4000 BC when the Sahara was wet. 

During the period called the African Aqualithic, the major water systems connected the Nile and Central Africa. The historian Roland Oliver describes the Green Sahara as follows:

"[In] the highlands of the central Sahara beyond the Libyan desert,... in the great massifs of the Tibesti and the Hoggar, the mountaintops, today bare rock, were covered at this period with forests of oak and walnut, lime, alder and elm. The lower slopes, together with those of the supporting bastions — the Tassili and the Acacus to the north, Ennedi and Air to the south — carried olive, juniper and Aleppo pine. In the valleys, perennially flowing rivers teemed with fish and were bordered by seed-bearing grasslands."

The 8000 year black mahogany Dufuna dugout was found in the Sahara buried 16 feet under clays and sands whose alternating sequence showed evidence of deposition in standing and flowing water. Peter Breunig (University of Frankfurt) wrote this description of the Dufuna boat:

“The bow and stern are both carefully worked to points, giving the boat a notably more elegant form”, compared to “the dugout made of conifer wood from Pesse in the Netherlands, whose blunt ends and thick sides seem crude”. Judging by stylistic sophistication, Breunig reasons that, “It is highly probable that the Dufuna boat does not represent the beginning of a tradition, but had already undergone a long development, and that the origins of water transport in Africa lie even further back in time.”

African Sheer Zone

Gray areas are interconnected water systems

In ancient times, there was commerce along the interconnected river systems that extended from the Nile to the Atlantic Ocean. Rock paintings in the Sahara show people moving cattle on boats. The boat types include sickle, incurved sickle, square, incurved square and flared, as found on the prehistoric rock art of the Central Eastern Desert of Egypt.

The data of Genesis indicates Africa as the point of origin of Abraham's Horite Hebrew ancestors. The shrine city of Nekhen on the Nile dates to 3800 BC and was an early site of Horite Hebrew worship. It has a twin city on the opposite side of the river.

The Sumerians were dispersed cattle-herding Proto-Saharans. This explains the cultural and linguistic similarities between ancient roots in African languages and Sumerian and Akkadian. Akkadian was the language of Nimrod's territory in Mesopotamia. Nimrod was a Kushite kingdom builder (Gen. 10:8).

The aquatic civilization of middle Africa has increasingly gained the interest of archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists. They have found archaic burial grounds (7500 BC), a royal city in the jungle of Nigeria with 72 foot high ramparts that run for a 100 miles, prehistoric rock shelters and petroglyphs. Also 9000 year fish bones, harpoons, and pottery along dried river and lake beds.

Alex Wilshaw describes the changes that took place in middle Africa and along the Mega-Nile Valley.

The Late-Pleistocene/Holocene period was characterised by wet and dry phases (pluvials and interpluvials) that caused a series of associated changes in lake levels; these changes ranged from full lake overflow (when the lakes of Nakuru and Elmenteita formed a single body of water) to complete desiccation, which resulted in an archaeological hiatus between 6.0 and 4.0 thousand years ago (kya). Within the lake basins, there are three different types of ecologies that exist in bands at different altitudinal levels – savannah (lowland), bush-woodland (mid-range) and montane-forest (highland). The climatic changes caused these ecological bands to migrate altitudinally; wet phases led to the expansion of bush and montane-forest into lowland areas, and arid phases saw the expansion of savannah lands to higher altitudes. (From here.)

Related reading: The Historicity of Noah's Flood; Water Systems Connected Nile and Central Africa; When the Sahara Was Wet; Sudan is Archaeologically Rich; 70,000 Year Settlement in the Sudan; The Lithic Traditions of Late Pleistocene settlement at Afad, Sudan by Piotr Osypiński; Boats and Cows of the Proto-Saharans; Cemetery Dates to Time Before Noah; African Stone, Shell and Egg Technologies; Why Nekhen is Anthropologically Significant

Afar Rift provides valuable information

Lavas from the Afar Depression in Ethiopia, where three tectonic plates are spreading apart, have given scientists a new insight into how ocean basins form.

Erta Ale lava lake in the Afar region

The Afar region is geologically unique, as it is the only place in the world where two continents are at the advanced stage of pulling away from each other. Geology tells us that when tectonic plates pull apart like this, the continental crusts usually gets thinner causing a depression to form between them. This often gets filled with a sea or, if the continents break apart altogether, a new ocean basin. By studying this so-called rifting process in the present, geologists hope to better understand how other ocean basins, like the North Atlantic, formed.

The Afar rift is home to numerous volcanoes and the magma the feeds these plays an important role in causing the crust to rift apart. UK and US researchers wanted to understand how and where the magma that causes the rifting in Afar is formed.

Read it all here.

Building Blocks of Life Came from Deep Earth

The rise of the first complex life depended on vital metals brought up to the Earth's surface from far below in vast granite deposits, a new study argues.

Metals like copper, zinc and molybdenum are essential ingredients for certain enzymes and proteins. These are needed for life forms with a complex internal structure, known as eukaryotes, to evolve. Without these metals the history of life could have been very different; plants and animals made of many cells could have taken hundreds of millions more years to develop, if they appeared at all.

The new study's authors realised that eukaryotes started appearing soon after a period of unusual geological activity, and wonder if it could have provided the raw materials they needed.

'Biologists have been saying for a long time that these three metals are essential for complex life to develop,' says Professor John Parnell, a geologist at the University of Aberdeen and lead author of the paper, which appears in Geology. 'And geologists have been aware that there was a period of unusual geological activity around the same time that would have brought an extraordinary amount of these metals to the surface. But I think we're the first to put the two together and suggest that the geological changes actually enabled the biological advances.'

In particular, eukaryotic life is needed for sex differences to emerge. Until living things have both males and females, rapid evolution is impossible; sexual reproduction allows the mixing of genes from both parents, so that a population can contain much more variation for natural selection to work on. Before sexual reproduction, variations in populations of living things could stem only from occasional random mutations, so evolution moved much more slowly.

The explosion of new life took place during a period known as the Mesoproterozoic, around 1.6 billion years ago. This followed the birth of a new supercontinent known as Nuna or Columbia around 1.9 billion years ago, which triggered major changes in the activity of the Earth's mantle beneath.

Read more here.

Phil Jones on Burnet's Sacred Theology of the Earth

Over at Genesis and Geology, Phil Jones has written an interesting piece on Thomas Burnet's Telluris Theoria Sacra, or Sacred Theory of the Earth. It was a speculative cosmogony, in which Burnet suggested a that the Earth was hollow and filled with water until Noah's flood. He calculated the amount of water on Earth's surface and recognized that there is not enough to account for a worldwide Flood. Burnet was influenced by Descartes who had written on the Earth' creation in Principia philosophiae (1644).

Thomas Burnet (1635-1715)

At Just Genesis I have written about the problems that arise when we read Genesis as an account of world events, rather than events involving the Afro-Asiatic populations from whom we receive these accounts. I am not as critical of Biblical literalism as I am of those who ignore the original cultural context of the material. This is one reason I oppose Young Earth Creationism.

Jones takes up another point. He writes:

"But Mortenson’s [read Young Earth Creationists here] arguments also seem to imply that once upon a time Christians studied nature through the lens of an uncompromising scriptural worldview, with the Bible in one hand and their scientific instruments in the other. One point I am trying to make is that such a golden age of heroic Biblicism never existed.”

Read the whole article here.


Related reading: Between Biblical Literalism and Biblical Illiteracy; Was Earth Repopulated After Noah's Flood?; How Big Was Noah's Flood?