The Sahara Read online

  The sub-sea level conditions of the Chott el-Djerid are broadly the same in Egypt’s Qattara Depression, which marks the Sahara’s lowest point in places more than 400 feet below sea level; the depression is an area of 7,000 square miles, mainly saltpans and one-time marshes. Like the Chott el-Djerid, the Qattara Depression’s surface is saline and unstable, although there are guides willing to lead interested parties along one or more of the basin’s more stable paths. Of the few who do venture into these places, farmers are not among them, the salinity of the soil in both the Chott el Djerid and the Qattara Depression rendering agriculture impossible. Not even the highly salt tolerant palm tree can cope with the high saline content in the regions’ soil.

  While in too high a concentration salt kills soil and prevents agriculture, it is vital and is the most precious of all the Sahara’s minerals. Rightly praised as a jewel among the desert produce, evidence of its importance can be found in the earliest human records found in the Sahara. To this day, great lengths are gone to in order to extract, process and sell this life-giving commodity, and wealthy empires have flourished in the Sahara just because of the presence of salt and its distant, hungry markets.

  Among the most notable of the cities founded on salt are Taoudenni in Mali and Bilma in Niger, both of which have been centres of the salt trade for centuries. Whether through mining or harvesting from saltpans, the cargo was transported to the furthest ends of the Sahara and beyond. At the height of these empires it was not unusual for the annual camel caravans to number in the tens of thousands. Early accounts of such camel trains come from the great Arab travellers and geographers al-Idrisi and Ibn Battuta. Today, camel salt caravans have virtually disappeared, and the most sought after minerals lie somewhat further down in the form of oil and gas.

  It is a great irony of modern Saharan travel, that while petrol-powered vehicles provide access to more of the desert to more people than before, they have also largely eliminated the need for camel transport, thus removing the romantic sight of a camel caravan that many travellers still dream of seeing. The greatest of late twentieth-century Saharan explorers are also not so far removed from their centuries-long Arab predecessors. Just as it was once geographers who recorded what they saw of the Sahara, today the majority of exploration is conducted by geologists, commissioned by patrons in the boardrooms of energy companies, sending them out to discover energy beneath the desert floor.

  Flora and Fauna

  If petroleum engineers are not usually thought of as overly interested in flora and fauna, perhaps they should be. After all, the precious oil and gas found in such quantities below the surface of the Sahara was once living itself Every species of plant and animal that now dwells in the desert has somehow evolved in order to survive in one of the world’s most demanding and unforgiving natural habitats. The camel - of whom more later - is only the most obvious example of an animal whose adaptations allow it to thrive where, for instance, the horse cannot.

  Nor is the Sahara as devoid of life as the casual observer might imagine. Hundreds of species of insects live happily within its borders. Each species of ant, fly, moth, spider, centipede, locust and beetle manages to eke out an existence because all have adapted to the particular conditions of desert life. Water is obviously the key to all life, but in hot deserts and away from the oases the rarity, scarcity and unpredictability of rainfall have forced both plants and animals to evolve. In the case of certain species of frog and toad, their spawn can wait years for life-giving rainfall that will cause the swift reanimation of dormant life, with tadpoles sprouting and maturing in double-quick time.

  Similarly, certain plant species have developed to allow the seeds to survive for years, and in some cases for decades, until a single shower will see them spring to life: seeds turn into seedlings and then rapidly become fully mature, flowering plants that disperse seeds of their own, which in turn lie waiting for the arrival of rain. A number of plant species support delightful names, including grasses such as the scrubby Cram-cram, which grows in low clumps often near the hardy acacia tree, and the Had, both of which thrive along the Sahara’s southern border. More impressive are the Sodom Apple or Calotrope, native to central Saharan regions, a large, woody bush with thick, fleshy leaves and pink flowers, and the pleasant-sounding and succulent Desert Melon, but be warned: the latter is a strong emetic, as any who have been tempted to feast on its ground-hugging fruit will attest.

  Of the trees, the date palm is best suited to the desert. Able to survive with limited water and high levels of salinity, it is hardly surprising that the date is so highly praised in the folklore of the region and the Middle East as a whole. Acacia trees found in the desert, primarily but by no means exclusively in more mountainous areas, tend to be survivors of a past time instead of new plants, veterans of the Sahara rather than cadets.

  Flora and fauna are both integral to the delicate ecosystem that exists in the Sahara, with the trees and smaller plants providing shelter and sustenance to any number of the animal species and with animals fulfilling their share of the bargain by assisting in the dispersal of seeds. For seed dispersal over the greatest distances, plants can do no better than to be eaten by a bird. Most bird species found in the Sahara are visitors. Crossing from West and Central Africa to take advantage of cooler European summers, they migrate south back across the desert to avoid the harsh northern winter. Although drawn by nature to this annual migration, the journey is long and extremely hard and many thousands of small birds do not survive. The corpses of doves, flycatchers, pigeons, pipits, swallows and thrushes will most often be found in early summer, killed by the heat and failure to find water while en route to Europe.

  Many ground-based animals share the common characteristic of outsized ears, which allows them to thrive in the desert. Most famous is the Fennec, a small fox-like rodent. These cartoonish appendages are also prominent on the desert fox, desert hare and desert hedgehog. Apart from providing them with an auditory advantage while hunting insects, the ears also allow for the dispersal of heat, thereby allowing the animals to survive.

  Unfortunately for naturalists, the larger the desert mammal the rarer it is and, therefore, the slighter the chance of seeing one. The tracks of increasingly rare Saharan gazelle or antelopes such as the Oryx and addax may be found but one can spend a lifetime without seeing the beasts themselves. Conversely, among some of the more plentiful desert reptiles, one must hope that any encounter is not too unexpected, scorpions in particular being attracted to the warm bodies of sleeping people. Hiding is also the specialized hunting technique of the horned viper, which lies in wait for its prey just beneath the sand, its eponymous horns alone visible above the surface. Woe-betide the barefooted wanderer who steps on this denizen of the desert. Its venom might not be lethal but its bite will do more than put one in a bad mood.

  Whether gazing down from the peak of a mountain or dune, or looking up from below sea level, the Sahara is a land of enormous geographical variety and some beauty, much of which is unknown or too often overlooked. Travelling at high speed may create the illusion that one has seen a great deal of the desert, but in reality one has seen nothing at all. Of nowhere is this truer than the Sahara, which deserves to be discovered over time.

  The long-eared Fennec Fox

  Whales in the Desert

  ‘‘And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas: and God saw that it was good.”

  Genesis, 1:9-10, King James Version

  If asked which words one associated with the Sahara, only the most dedicated surrealist might be expected to offer “whale”. “Camel” and “sand” are far more likely choices. But in fact the surrealist would not be entirely wrong-albeit harking back millions of years to the desert’s pre-prehistory. This arid expanse hardly seems the
ideal habitat for whales but long before the camels moved in (between 3000 and 3500 years ago, making them the most recent mammalian arrival) it was actually teeming with all sorts of marine life. In a period that one can think of as the Sahara’s pre-pre-history, a large part of the landmass that would eventually become the largest hot desert on earth lay submerged beneath a vast body of water, the Tethys Sea. Thus, the whale was a resident of what was to become the Sahara.

  The sea has long vanished. Today there are only a small number of oases scattered across the northern third of continental Africa which the Sahara covers, mere specks on the map where water allows life in the middle of an otherwise seemingly lifeless and desolate landscape. Yet evidence of the Sahara’s watery past can be seen in numerous places, with more fossil discoveries being made every year by marine palaeontologists and archaeologists working in the desert. One of the most impressive sites of fossil remains to be found anywhere in the Sahara also happens to be one of its most accessible, situated as it is less than a hundred miles southwest of Cairo. Wadi al-Hitan, the Valley of the Whales, covers one hundred square miles and contains one of the world’s most important collections of fossils of early whales, which is why in 2005 Unesco added it to its list of World Heritage sites.

  The majority of the hundreds of fossil remains found in Wadi al-Hitan are examples of the proto-whale known as the Basilosaurus, or “King Lizard”, which belonged to a long extinct sub-order of whales called Archaeoceti alive and swimming approximately forty million years ago. With an adult Basilosaurus growing up to 69 feet long, they were not only noticeably smaller than today’s Blue Whales (up to 115 feet) but also a great deal sleeker, with an elongated body more reminiscent of an inflated eel than a bulbous whale.

  Whale skeleton at Wadi al-Hitan

  Explaining its decision to grant World Heritage status, Unesco explained that “Wadi Al-Hitan is the most important site in the world to demonstrate one of the iconic changes that make up the record of life on Earth: the evolution of the whales.” Easily discerned in the fossil record, one can see whales in one of the last stages of their evolution, complete with tiny limbs sticking out from the area of their rear flanks. While complete with moveable joints and toes, these small “legs” are too small to have been of any practical use in supporting the immense body weight of the Basilosaurus. Instead, these vestigial limbs are said by palaeontologists to be evidence of the unusual reverse evolution of whales, wherein they returned to a marine existence having previously been land-based mammals.

  It might seem too long ago to be worth considering, but the Sahara’s marine past and the seas retreat is every bit as important as its later, desiccated periods. It is believed that the Tethys Sea evolved out of the mega marine body known as the Tethys Ocean. This super ocean existed before continental drift had fashioned shorelines into the shapes familiar to us today. The terms Tethys Ocean and Tethys Sea are frequently and frustratingly used interchangeably, in spite of their being at one time distinct bodies of water. This is perhaps forgivable, since many questions related to ancient geology are still, no pun intended, evolving. But the sea is what we are interested in when considering the time when our Egyptian whales died. This “smaller” body of water encompassed the whole of the modern Mediterranean basin, southern Europe, northern Africa and a water bridge that covered Anatolia and the Levant and stretched east through Iran and Iraq, covering contemporary northern India.

  Only named in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Tethys Sea took its name from the Titan goddess, one of those deities who, according to Greek mythology ruled over heaven and earth during the so-called Golden Age, before they were vanquished by the Olympians, that younger generation of upstart gods who made their home on Mount Olympus. As the goddess of fresh water, Tethys was believed to be the source of rivers, springs, streams, fountains and rain clouds. Tethys was thus responsible for nourishing the earth. Referring to “Tethys our mother”, Homer, in his eighth-century BCE epic the Iliad, places Tethys at the heart of the literary history of the Sahara even before the desert existed. The wife of Oceanus, Tethys was able to draw water from her husband, before passing it on to mankind through underground springs, which appeared in the world as if by magic. Among the forty or so children born to Tethys were such familiar names as Asia, Styx (the river that marks the boundary between earth and the underworld) and a son Nilus, the god of the Nile.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, French palaeontologists and geologists working in the deserts of central Niger independently discovered teeth and other fossil remains of another gargantuan prehistoric marine dwelling animal in the valley of Gadoufaoua, which in the local Tuareg language means “the place where camels fear to go”. A fuller picture of this mammoth marine creature was not completed until additional, large-scale discoveries were made in the late 1990s by Paul Sereno from the University of Chicago and his team. Named Sarcosuchus imperator by scientists, the animal is better known by its media tag: Supercroc. A Sarcosuchus imperator jawbone discovered by the team measured an impressive six feet on its own. Only distantly related to modern crocodiles, the ancient behemoth, which lived some 110 million years ago, grew up to forty feet long and weighed between eight and ten tonnes. The death knell sounded for Sarcosuchus, Basilosaurus and similar water-dependent mega-fauna between 30 and 26 million years ago, when the Sahara went through a major climatic change, resulting in a more tropical and drier environment.

  In order to get to the formation of the Sahara as desert, needs force us to jump forward some 24 million years into the Pleistocene Epoch or “most new age”, the older of two epochs in the Quaternary Period, the period through which we are still living. By 1.8 million years ago the outline of the continent of Africa was clearly recognizable. The epoch was characterized by repeated periods of widespread glaciation and thaw, or interglacials, in which violent temperature fluctuations led to the extinction of most species of megafauna, including the sabre-toothed tigers and the mammoth. It also saw the extinction of horses and camels in their home continent of North America. In place of the big beasts, large numbers of smaller animals including mice, birds and cold-blooded species emerged, better suited to the new prevailing conditions. But it was not just small fauna that benefited from the change in the weather, because it was during this time that modern humans evolved, from Homo erectus, upright man, into Homo sapiens, so-called wise man, just 200,000 years ago.

  Our recognizably human ancestors quickly set themselves apart from their predecessors, developing most of those social characteristics one still associates with mankind. No longer content just to eke out an existence, people made the great leap to living in societies. Evidence of early human societies can be found across the Sahara in many forms; in tools and products fashioned by these tools, from the remains of animals killed and skinned to the building of shelters and the digging of graves and the first human burials. As if all of these accomplishments were not enough, it was also during this period that our ancestors in the Sahara, as elsewhere, moved ahead in other, profoundly moving ways by mastering the use of language and in creating works of art.

  The Green Sahara

  Having established that whales used to swim in a sea that once covered what is now the Sahara, readers should have no difficulty accepting that at another point in time it was a green and pleasant land. Great fluctuations between wet and dry weather occurred in the Sahara from roughly 10,000 to 4000 BCE, the period rightly known as the Green or Wet Sahara. Indeed, to talk about the “Sahara’ is somewhat misleading, as the desert region that now fits this description did not, in a sense, exist at this time.

  For thousands of years, landscapes that are today extremely inhospitable used to abound with a rich variety of flora and fauna. Where now there exists a relative paucity of biodiversity there were once well-watered places supporting a large number of productive environments, including rainforests and grassland as well as marshes and other wetlands. Water was so abundant tha
t it offered a home to such marine animals as the hippopotamus, not to mention innumerable species of fish. The savannah was covered in grasses that provided for large mammals such as the elephant, giraffes and gazelle, which were in turn prey for the lions with which they shared the plains. Tibesti, Ennedi and Air, today barren and rocky ranges, were instead mountains blanketed in trees - oak, pine, olive and walnut providing fruit for a multitude of animal populations. Indeed, the wealth of flora and fauna that once existed accounts for the massive reserves of oil and gas that are found under the Sahara today. Naturally, this Eden-like Sahara was just as favourable to emerging human societies.

  There is plenty of evidence regarding relatively complex human societies during the time of the Green Sahara. The earliest named culture to emerge from the obscurity of pre-history is the Aterian industry, evidence of which stretches from the Atlantic almost to the banks of the River Nile, making it easily the most widespread of North African cultures at this time. It is called an Aterian industry because although the carefully made stone tools from this period share certain common features, it is not appropriate to yoke all those responsible for crafting these tools under one common culture as we might understand the term today. Once confidently said to have emerged around 40,000 BCE, recent finds in Morocco, north of the Sahara, have pushed back the date for Aterian industry to more than 170,000 BCE.

  Although one of the Sahara’s periodic changes in climate is the most commonly posited reason for the utter disappearance of the Aterian industry around 10,000 years ago, it is also around the same time that the Capsian, an even lesser known culture than the Aterian, emerged. Named after Gafsa, the Tunisian town where it was first identified, the Capsian was a Mesolithic culture that lasted for about four thousand years, dying out in approximately 6,000 BCE, whose influence was confined to parts of Algeria, Tunisia and a small number of sites in ancient Cyrenaica or modern Libya.