🔬 Science 1d ago · The Long View

We tend to picture the Sahara as an eternal desert, but sediment cores and cave paintings show that as recently as 6,000 years ago it was a green savanna crossed by rivers and lakes, populated by hippos, crocodiles and cattle-herding people whose rock art still survives on the walls of Tassili n’Ajjer

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We tend to picture the Sahara as an eternal desert, but sediment cores and cave paintings show that as recently as 6,000 years ago it was a green savanna crossed by rivers and lakes, populated by hippos, crocodiles and cattle-herding people whose rock art still survives on the walls of Tassili n’Ajjer
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Six thousand years ago, a hippo could have wallowed in a lake in what is now central Algeria. Cattle herders drove their animals across grasslands that are now dune fields. Crocodiles lived in rivers that no longer exist. We know this because the people who watched them painted them on sandstone, and the paintings are still there.
The Tassili n’Ajjer plateau in southeastern Algeria holds thousands of rock engravings and paintings spanning thousands of years. They show elephants, giraffes,

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