[Music] little tiny man there no be there right onto the laptop don't ever talk to me like that again I don't know if the lav mic works here it's like some actually my chest hair I'm like Austin Powers it's just like a carpet from here down the year is 2000 and you are sitting in the back seat of a Range Rover in your is a Walkman playing uh Higher by Creed through a pair of well-worn foam headphones and outside the window are hundreds of miles of scorching sand in every direction you are on a team led by paleontologist Paul Sereno looking for dinosaur fossils in the Nigerian Sahara desert but little do you know that you and your team are about to make a discovery that will forever change how we view human history the Caravan of Range Rovers comes to an abrupt stop jerking you awake from the Sweet Melody of Scott stop grunt in your ears word is that Rudyard Sadler another member of Dr sereno's team had noticed some bones sticking out of the sand naturally you break to investigate being a bunch of weirdos messing around in the middle of the desert what Sadler had discovered was not the remains of a dinosaur but of a modern crocodile and as you turn the fossil over in your hands another member of the team David Blackburn announces that he has found something shocking as the group crowds around him they see in the Sand by his feet a small fragment of a human skull this absolutely changed the game what Dr sereno's team was dealing with was no longer just a paleontological site dealing with ancient animals but an archaeological site dealing with humans you and the rest of the team begin to frantically record everything you are discovering bones of fish mammals and reptiles are emerging from the desert sand all around you but then you hear a shout and the rest of the dig Team comes to an abrupt stop running down one of the dunes is a man holding something above his head his name is Mike hetar and he is the Expedition photographer wielding his digital camera as he approaches the group winded he gestures towards the fragment of human skull and says quote that ain't nothing look at this as he turns his camera towards you you and the rest of the team gather around to see his Discovery as he says whole human skeletons just over there lots of them what sereno's team discovered on that blazing Day in the year 2000 was much more than just an assemblage of Bones what they had discovered was a sprawling and ancient Cemetery it contained elaborate and well-preserved burials of cultures which had little evidence up until this point such as the accordion man a 9,500 Ye Old skeleton that archaeologists believe was tightly wrapped in hides or ropes upon the time of burial and the aptly named Halloween man a 7,000 year-old male skull with inzer file to points in the many years since the discovery of goera more than 50 Graves have been excavated on the site This Is 50 of nearly 200 these Graves tell the story of a 6,000 year period between 10,000 years before present and about 4,000 years before present so what are these Graves doing in the middle of the scorching Sahara Desert surrounded by bones of animals like gazel hippos fish and turtles these bones are relics of a time when the Sahara was not a vast hot sandy desert but rather a lush and fertile grassland a time that today we refer to as the African humid period or colloquially the green Sahara today we are going to be exploring this alien land we will dive into the lives of the people who once lived there and try and put ourselves in their shoes we'll try and understand how this environment came to be what it was like when it existed and what happened to it all in a hope to gain a better perspective to the people who are just like you and I who once called this place home ladies and gentlemen my name is Milo Rossi and today it is my great pleasure to tell you the stories left behind by the ghosts of the green Sahara what if I carried you around like this all the time like a small like a small little man I should probably actually make an introduction here uh this is Manzanita or nits uh she's my new child I gave birth to her yeah you little wow this is glitching out horribly what did you do nits evidence for the green Sahara dates back much farther than our modern archaeological investigations and the discoveries in 2000 in 1855 renowned German Explorer Hinrich bath had just returned from an arduous 5-year Expedition through the Sahara Desert when he returned from his travels he depicted some rather unusual sightings he had come across cave paintings and carvings depicting humans but also gazelle and giraffe and hippos carvings which he reported were surrounded by hundreds of miles of empty sand in every direction these were the first hints to European forces that the Sahara Desert had not always been a Barren Wasteland that there was a time where it was not only home to animals and water but people and their vibrant cultures 70 years after Bar's travels in the Sahara another Discovery was made this one by the much more famous Hungarian Explorer llo Alma oh you got too close to me and then you got scooped Alma was an explorer who was looking into Egypt's Southern desert and it was in this Southern desert that Alma made a discovery which has gone on to inspire books and movies it's a site with a pretty self-explanatory name none other than the cave of swimmers from the outside the cave of swimmers is wholly unremarkable it consists of four caves that are carved into a large Sandstone wall and it's located at the very southwestern part of the modern country of Egypt it is part of a greater complex called the VOD Sur or the valley of pictures which is on the southern end of a large Plateau the greater Plateau is called the guil cabar and is a 3,000 square m Sandstone Plateau stretching from Libya into Egypt the cave of swimmers which was discovered in the iur or the valley of pictures had some pretty spectacular artwork in it it has a lot of paintings of animals and handprints all of which are done in red ochre but not only are there handprints and animal drawings there are depictions of humans some of them wearing elaborate robes some of them appearing to be dancing but some appear to be swimming now you may be thinking to yourself paintings of people swimming in the desert that's a little weird kind of the whole thing about a desert is it's one of the hardest places to go swimming in in 1935 when Aly wrote his book The Unknown Sahara he mentioned the cave of swimmers and in his book he postulates a very interesting theory that the paintings of the cave of swimmers are real life depictions illustrating something that had actually happened right there the implication of this theory was that there was a time when there was water in the Sahara and people were like Ah hell no absolutely not the Sahara the biggest desert like kind of ever now being completely honest I'm not too surprised that Alay was met with a little bit of skepticism on that claim because if I lived in 1930s and someone came up to me and said hey the Sahara used to be full of water I'd look them dead in the eye and ask them if they got Heat or if they supported women's right to vote for legal reasons that was a a joke oh godamn llo you know you're just talking all kinds of craziness now first you're saying there's water in the Sahara and then you're going to be trying to tell me that those suffragettes are on to something but time has changed a lot Lazlo's Discovery was nearly 100 years ago and Hinrich Bar's Discovery before that nearly 150 so a lot has changed since then for example we now have archaeological Botanical and geologic evidence to support the fact that the Sahara was once a lush green grassland and women have the right to vote so with a quick history lesson out of the way I think it's time to look at the star of the show so let's talk a little bit about what it was like when the Sahara was green I also uh totally uh forgot fellas as you can see I'm no longer suffering through the freezing cold uh in my studio the last video I filmed was uh uh I filmed it in like February so now I no longer freezing to death in the studio because it's a baly 72° and you know what that means guns out the Sahara was green between about 16,000 and 5,000 years before present okay pause I'm I'm sure there's a question a burning question that some of you have been questioning for yourself uh and that is the obvious wow Milo this is all great well and good love to hear about some archaeology we're going to talk about some cool bones and stuff but why was the Sahara green the Sahara Desert is like the thing that you think of when you think of desert well my friend that is an excellent excellent question and the right question that you should be asking so let me break this down for you we you and I are on a tiny Pebble uh hurdling through space which means that our planet is moving it's moving in a few different ways the Earth spins which gives us our day and night cycle it has an axis that it can tilt on and as I hope all of you are familiar with uh we orbit the sun now all of these movements are not consistent so they can change kind of on a cycle think of a top spinning it's always spinning but it'll some sometimes Wobble the first of the three major movements that our planet does that influences the horror show that goes on on this little rock is our orbit around the sun our eccentricity as it's called and that is on a cycle of about 100,000 years meaning that over the course of 100,000 years the earth will kind of go between closer and farther from the Sun as it orbits then there's the tilt of its axis or its obliquity obliquity obliquities nut and that is on a cycle of about 41,000 years and the most important part to this story is the Earth's wobble as it goes on its procession around the Sun and this is on a cycle of about 25,000 years which means that every 25,000 years the earth tilts little bit back and forth like this these three Cycles the eccentricity obliquity and wobble are known as the milanovich cycles and you're probably familiar with them if you're watching this channel you got have stumbled across them at some point but today the first two don't really matter all we got to worry about is wobbling so if you want to wobble this way I'll tell you a little bit about it okay I'm going to throw some science words at you but you're going to hold my hand we're going to get through this just fine I promise you're smarter than you give yourself credit for the Earth has a thing called the parhelion you know I'm now realizing my immensely talented editorial team could probably be putting Graphics which explain this in much greater Clarity on the board right now but I'm going through the extra effort of showing you with my hands possibly making it even more confusing anyway the parhelion is the closest that the Earth gets to the Sun so as the Earth orbits the Sun in its oneyear rotation there is somewhere along that turn where the Earth is the closest point to the Sun than it is at any other given point today our parah ion occurs in early January meaning that during the Northern Hemisphere winter when the earth is tilted that way a little bit it hits the closest point to the Sun but because of the Earth's wobble there will be times where the Earth is not pointing this direction and pointing this direction instead during the green Sahara period the parhelion would have occurred in northern hemisphere summer meaning that an entirely different part of the planet would have been facing the Sun during the parhelion now our closes point the Earth passes 91 million miles from the sun which is really really really really far but this is about 3 million miles closer to the Sun than we are at our farthest point which is really really really really far that tiny difference of about 3 million miles is enough to make a pretty big difference on the planet depending on which way it's pointing this tilt means that during the African humid period the Sahara Desert or what's now the Sahara Desert got a 7% increase in solar radiation but that doesn't make any sense if there's more solar radiation shouldn't it be hotter I.E even more desert counterintuitively that extra heat is actually the thing that kicked off the African humid period land has a high albo not to be confused with a high libido oh gotcha meow is Right little man which means that the surface of the land heats up a lot more than water does so while North Africa got absolutely blasted by thermal radiation it got really really hot but the Atlantic Ocean right next door remained very cold this meant that during the Summers the hot air over the African continent would rise up this would create a low pressure Zone which would allow for all of that cold moist air from the Atlantic Ocean to rush in to fill its place which would result in exactly what you would expect monsoons during the African humid period much of North Africa would have been inundated in massive seasonal monsoons called rather un originally the West African Monsoon this will be on the test so since this Monsoon rain is linked to the direction that the planet is facing and the direction the planet is facing is on a 21,000 year cycle this means that the Sahara Desert will turn into a lust green grassland about once every 21,000 years so what we today called the African humid period or green Sahara is actually just the most recent instance of something that has been happening every 21,000 years for the last 800,000 years that is a lot of green Saharas whoa wait it's me Milo from the future and I'm I'm seeing something they're they're going to the comments right now and and they're writing and it's saying see the climate has always been changing but I want you to stop and I am talking directly to you before you leave that comment go do some research the milanovich Cycles do affect the climate of the planet and yes the climate of the planet has always been changing but what we are experiencing right now is anthropogenic man-made climate change this is something which is unanimously agreed upon by scientists and we have extensive chemical evidence to back it up if you do not believe in man-made climate change it leaves me with one of two options one is that the information and the facts hasn't been commun communicated well to you which is a failure of the system climate change is something that is kind of complex and you need a base of understanding in order to get it and there are a lot of informational bodies that do everything they can to keep us complicit so that we don't have the tools to understand these things for ourselves or secondly it's that you do know the truth about climate change and you're choosing to ignore it in which case I don't know what to tell you so whether you choose now to resume that comment or not the last thing I want to leave you with is this not understanding the facts does not make them any less true all right anyway that that's all that Milo has from the future head well I'll explain the rest so the people who lived their lives in this part of the world would have lived in an environment that was dictated by Massive seasonal rains an easy misconception to have about the African humid period is that it was just like a more temperate climate for some reason but really it wasn't that the land was any cooler or you know more fertile it was just that it received a lot more rain this rain would come in bursts with incredibly rainy Summers and then much cooler drier Winters the people who created the paintings at the cave of swimmers would have lived lives dictated by these seasons of massive rainstorms and they are far from the only ones cuz the vur or Valley of pictures where the cave of swimmers is located is home to a lot more rock art take for example the rock art at Margaret elcara these beautiful images depict Shepherds with Liv stock and the Wadi Hamra rock art shows images of animals like giraffes but one of the most famous of these caves is the cave of beasts you got it look hey buddy come here yeah is that warm you're so damn cute I don't want to take you off my laptop but I have a job to do you know what no we can we can work around this neats the cave of beasts contains nearly 5,000 different pieces of rock art and they are absolutely beautiful they show things like the classic handprints as well as many human figures some of them dancing and partaking in ritual others wearing elaborate outfits but the cave truly gets its name from the countless depictions of wild animals present all across its walls oh thank you now you just turned my computer off okay neats I'm sorry you're being evicted so with all of those scientific tools that we just put in your tool box now we can do the really fun part I want you to grab my hand because we are going back in time back in do you find the carvings of the African humid period as interesting as I do I think there's something really beautiful and elegant about them and the impetus for me making this video was the cave of swimmers it was the thing that kind of kicked this whole research rabbit hole off that turned into the video you see today and I think the cave of swimmers is something that's so beautiful that it's something that I wanted to incorporate onto myself which is why I have worked once again with the wonderful people at Sweet Leaf jewelry to make this beautiful ring inspired by the cave of swimmers is that focusing oh yeah look at those little guys on there swimming around forgive my weird ring tan line underneath uh this ring normally there's another ring this is the backup ring it's a whole thing okay don't worry about it for those of you who are familiar with my channel you will know that Sweet Leaf jewelry is a small independent silver smith in England that I've worked with many times before to create some beautiful pieces of handcrafted silver jewelry as part of a pledge that I've made with myself and also kind of informally with all of you that if I'm going to have the platform that I do I want to uplift other people as well I would much rather make some beautiful piece of artwork and jewelry with an independent silver smith then you know talk about nordvpn not only do we have this beautiful Cave of swimmers inspired ring but we have this year pendant available only for a limited time so if you're watching this video early you may still have a chance and it can be sold with or without the chain depending on your budget and at the end of the day it allows you to not only wear a little piece of History wherever you go but support a small Independent Business while doing it if you're watching this at the Live premiere Sundays at it's 5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time both the cave of swingers swingers the uh the cave of swingers uh pendant and ring are available now Link in the description anyway thanks for listening let's get right back to the video if I get a single comment about anything that's going on here I'm going to dox you in my defense these weren't in the refrigerator they were sitting outside in like the 75 degree ass air and I frankly I want a cold beer more than I care about whether or not there's water in my beer okay it's a godamn Sierra Nevada we're not exactly drinking I don't know some expensive beer there's no expensive beer who am I kidding PS Blue Ribbon okay anyway um I really want to use this video as an opportunity to try and paint a picture for what the Sahara would have looked like during the African humid period so that you the viewer or listener depending on whether or not you're actually watching this or just playing it in the background while you're cleaning your room can better picture yourself in the world that these people would have lived in actually if you are playing this in the background while you're cleaning your room that's totally okay I do this all the time with videos my one request is uh sace sauage interaction it's like tipping the Bell hop you know I make a video that you can just play for free in the background I get to keep you company All I Ask help me boost the algorithm a little bit all right I feel like that's a pretty fair trade tip in the Bell hop more like top in the Bell hop a one of the best papers that I have found to try and illustrate what the environment would have been like around VOD Sora during the African humid period is called VOD Sora in its environmental setting by Frank Darius and it is from 2014 also if you're interested in any of the resources that I use to make this video um links to all of those are going to be in the description if you want to do any external research yourself for some of the major papers that I use I'll bring them up just so that you guys have some jumping off points so let's have a look at the topography around the southern end of the Gil cabar Plateau at the southern end of the plateau where the vura or Valley of pictures is located we can see the remains of many dry riverbeds a topographic map is really useful for more than just elevation it will allow us to kind of see things that the naked eye won't see if you just look at the desert on Google Maps you can't really see much definition but if you're looking at the topography you can identify riverbeds and valleys and Old Lake Shores that you would never be able to see otherwise it's a really wonderful tool in trying to piece together the history of an area now all the riverbeds in thead Sora are now dry but they aren't always even though this is the middle of the desert the desert can still occasionally get rain meaning that sometimes these little river channels will have trickles of water in them uh that can sustain I think they said there was like an acacia tree located you know within 15 mil of the cave of swim or something like that so there is some life that occasionally happens in these riverbeds but the reason these River beds are so pronounced is not because of the trickles of rain that are there today but because of the Torrens of rain that were there about 10,000 years ago as Monsoon rains would sweep over the African continent they would get hung up on the Gil cabar Plateau just like they do in mountain ranges anywhere else in the world and when they would get hung up there they would absolutely poor and the monsoon rains that fell on these mountains would have flown down past the valley of pictures and into two small basins one of these small freshwater lakes would have been right at the southern point of V surur meaning that the cave of swimmers was in all actuality right next to a lake about 10,000 years ago meaning that there's a very good chance that Aly who theorized uh that the depictions of swimmers were of an actual event or something that was happening at that area is actually correct and to the west of this Lake by the cave of pictures was another slightly larger Lake both of these Lakes would have had sizes that fluctuated quite a bit over the course of a year year again this was a monsoonal environment meaning that it would have one season where there was a ton of rain and another season where there's almost none so the cultures that developed around these Lakes likely lived in an environment where they were used to the Lakes filling up and overflowing their banks in one season and kind of receding in the more dry season but this inclusion of water allowed for a totally different environment to exist in what is now a desert this wouldn't have been like a lush jungle or rainforest or even a dense forest rather something resembling more of a savannah it would have a place where fields of tall grasses could grow and it had enough rain to sustain acacia trees the grasses in the savannah that would form from this rainfall was full of cereal grains and Wild game that people could hunt and the lakes obviously besides providing fresh water had fish and migratory birds that would land on them and even though the Savannah seems like something which even as far as a environment with rain is you know oh it's it's a little bit Barren you know it's kind of hard to exist there savanas have an unbelievable level of biodiversity and so even though this land wasn't a rainforest it was still an immensely productive place where people could have survived for and did survive for thousands of years so anyway back to these two Lakes there's the small lake at the bottom of the cave of swimmers and the slightly larger Lake to its West now if you look at the evidence in the sediments the evidence in the sediments that one's good tell that one to your soil science Professor maybe they'll make a shirt out of it I want 50% of the proceeds I got the motion in the ocean and the evidence in the sediments and the eccentricities not the evidence in the sediments shows that this larger Lake at its smallest would have been about 4 sare mil or 10 square km but at its largest it reached a size of 40 square mil or 100 square km roughly the size of Portland Maine or half the size of Martha's Vineyard or one quar the size of Marsh Island go black bears drink to MMA M runs out to Dear Old M wait how the does that song go drink to the careless day I can't believe that the eain school is about drinking and womanizing I'm a product of my environment at its largest this ancient Lake would have had a perimeter of about 75 Mi which is about 120 km or about the distance from Boston to Springfield or Burlington Vermont to Lebanon New Hampshire a wored a Portsmith you think it's bad when Americans try and avoid using the metric system I'm taking it to a new level I call this one New England nationalism I don't use any frame of reference for any size of anything other than what's in New England Connecticut doesn't count by the way you my one f bomb I can drop in this video and keep it PG-13 so we can see that the size of the lakes that these people would have lived around was far from insignificant these would have been huge bodies of water that sustained large groups of people and fostered the environments and cultures that grew around them but all Rivers have to lead to the Sea except for this one and now this one as well picture of the Colorado River you get it because America has absolutely destroyed her freshwater resources and these two are are no exception and for the past 800,000 years every time they were full that water eventually had to flow to the Sea now this is where the rabbit hole for this video ended up going really far because I kept finding these papers on like a specific site okay I figured out what the drainage is like around the vad surra so that's a start but then you zoom out and you realize that you know that map of the Paleo drainage around vura is like you know a postage stamp on you know most of Africa so I wanted to figure out where this water went which led me to something that I had never heard of in my life life something called the kufra river let's zoom out for a second as I've been explaining the monsoonal rains that would hit the V Sora it's been very localized we've been just looking at one area and the two lakes ponds even that would form there but I want you to remember that these Monsoon Seasons swept across the entire continent they would have been inundating the entirety of Northern Africa in massive seasonal rains okay going to take back entirety maybe there's a few places that didn't get it maybe there was a guy with an umbrella I don't want to see a single goddamn comment so understanding vad surra is important but now we have to look at how it fits into a much bigger puzzle of the entire ecosystem of North Africa during the African humid period all of the water that flowed off of the Gil cabar Plateau down vura into the two Lakes would eventually flow into a much bigger River in a 2012 paper entitled The kufra Paleo drainage system in Libya a past connection to the mediteran Ian sea Philip paloo at all writes about the discovery of one of these massive paleo drainage networks this team helped to identify a 550 M or 900 km long paleo drainage system in Libya this is what paloo has to say about how immense The Watershed for this ancient river would have been the kufer river paleo Watershed at its maximum extent would have covered more than 150,000 Square mil or 400,000 square km representing close to a quarter of the surface area of Libya that is about the size of 15 perms using radar Po's team was able to identify this massive paleo drainage system and the team found that there would have been three major watersheds that all led into this River one of them from our home site home at the Gil cabar Plateau another Watershed from a feature to the South called uat these two sites made up the Eastern side of the drainage basin and on the west side of the drainage basin was the Eastern side of the tibes mountains and so all of the water from this more than 150,000 square mile Watershed would have flowed into one River the remains of this ancient river can still be seen as a scar on the land the 250 M or 400 km long North Flowing Corridor that used to be the kufra river interestingly if you look at a map of this area you can see that the kufra river actually used to flow through what is now the kufra Oasis it's a little patch on the map that you can see with a town in it called alja there's some you know irrigation circles and stuff in there little a little bit of Farmland in pretty much desert in every direction oh I got to say not great with ice you guys were right now while I didn't look too much into the details of this particular Oasis I'm going to use some Context Clues here to infer that the reason that there is water present at this location is because it is a deposit of fossil water as it's called fossil water can be found all over the Sahara Desert as a relic from the African humid period water that has percolated deep into the ground and has remained in aquafers and not evaporated so while I'm sure there's a little bit of rain water and ground water that still percolate into this Basin I wouldn't be surprised if the reason there is still some water in this area is because of this ancient river that used to flow there from all Joff the ancient river Narrows and it ends up cutting a canyon through the Bedrock running another 250 km where it finally returns to grade and turns into an aluvial fan a Delta before all traces of it are lost under the Colin Cisco sand sea which is a massive tract of moving sand d that has covered that region of the Sahara Desert so what is on the other side of the sand sea where is this ancient kufra river flowing to does it end up out in the Mediterranean well eventually yes but before it gets to the Mediterranean it flows into something else or would have flown into something else at the end of the sand sea is the remains of another much much bigger River because the kufer river was just a tributary of the enormous Wadi sahabi paleo River look I actually have uh original sheet music from the Stein song uh a new Arrangement by Rudy Valley isn't that kind of cool look at that who who am I kidding why would you care about this at the other end of this enormous sand sea lies the remains of another paleo River we're going to use some context clues there is this River huge Watershed all flows north covered by the sand sea and then there's another River directly above it now you and and I might put our heads together and say to ourselves well I think in all likelihood the kufa river probably flowed into the V sahabi paleo River and yes that's probably exactly what happened but because that middle part is covered with sand at the end of the paper talking about the kufra river the author Ends by saying like we propose that there may be a connection between these two rivers now again I'm not saying you should speak without knowing cuz we don't know yet but that's just what I love about science is like look we don't have object permanence all the things can be right there but if we don't have that clear line of sight between them you don't publish the paper and that's why science works the W sahabi paleo channel is absolutely massive it is between a half and 2 and 1/2 mil in width which is about 2 to 4 km that's about the distance that I had to walk from my dorm to ohop to the spring to the sky to the trees in their glorious happiness to the calling us further evidence for the size of this River comes from how deep it is the channel eroded by the Wadi sahabi paleo river is more than 9 180 ft deep or about 300 M carved directly into Meine carbonate strata this is more than like a riverbed this is something closer to a canyon now this implies that the water that would have fallen at our lovely little V surur would have flowed all the way down into the kufa river a Paleo drainage system of more than 150,000 Square mil about 600 Mi to the north to an absolutely enormous river before finally flowing out to the Mediterranean Sea but the V sahab river is actually very very old way predating the even first instance of the African humid period 800,000 years ago there's evidence to suggest that this riverbed May date back as far as 50 million years to the late cazic period now this is a time that is so far back that we're not going to be going into it but the world would have been a very very different place then we're talking plate tectonic scale at this point the story we're talking about today is like climatic shifts and you know milanovich cycles and stuff but when you're going back 50 million years we got to bring plate tectonics into that I'm not going to do that to you you got you got to do today now during its Zenith potentially in the senzo period this river is believed to have had a discharge Equitable to that of the modern-day Nile River that is I need to read this number what 100,000 cubic feet per second or 2,830 cubic met I don't know if that's right fact check that I think that's right but the connection between this River and V Sur would have been established about 15 million years ago still a long time we're not going to go back there but a little bit more recently but this means that for the last 800,000 years every time there was an African humid period water would flow all the way from the Gil cabar all the way down into the kufra river into the Wadi sahabi River and out to the Mediterranean Sea now the thing that I found the most interesting while doing research on these sites is that it was really hard to do research on these sites there's not even a Wikipedia page for the W hobby river which is a very exciting element of this story the fact that there is precious little research that has been done in the Sahara Desert don't get me wrong there has been a lot much of the region has been mapped with lar and satellite imagery and has been explored pretty extensively but in the grand scheme of regions of the earth that we know a lot about the Sahara is one that just hasn't had that much research done in it but what's wonderful is that you and I are living in a golden age of archaeology it's a Renaissance a time where regions of the world that just haven't been looked into all that much are finally getting the attention they deserve and so why is that why is it that the Sahara contains the potential for so much history well humans like to do this thing uh where we like to um drink water because if we don't do it we shrivel up and die as the saying goes water is life and humans have a lovely habit of settling along water pretty much wherever we are if you do find a human settlement that isn't on water there's probably some other kind of weird reason why it is where it is but for most of human history water is kind of the thing that we needed to do so when you think about the size of these rivers and these lakes and the bodies of water that would have existed out here for thousands of years there is a lot of potential that there is going to be some pretty impressive archaeological discoveries to be found at them now I also want to temper our enthusiasm for just a moment here because the African humid period or the green Sahara is something which has been used a lot by some of the alternative history people they use it to support everything from that lost Advanced Globe spanning Ice Age civilization all the way up to Atlantis being lost in the Sands of the Sahara Desert now I'm obviously not taking it that far but what I am saying as an archaeologist and someone who firmly believes in not saying something until there is evidence to support it I think that there's a lot of evidence that some of the biggest discoveries in archaeology in our generation may come out of the Sahara Desert and now I'm sure there's going to be people who may contend me on that or contest me on that but as we're going to see continuing moving forward into this video it was a place that was bustling with life really not that long ago anyway I just had to get excited about archaeology for a second also all right all right let's get back on track here for a second have a little bit of this magic juice so this River syst syst is really impressive and clearly indicative of how complex the system would have been during the African humid period and paints a much better picture of what the world would have looked like but this is far from the only example of a large body of water resulting from this monsoonal environment and I think the most important one that we need to talk about is the amazingly named Lake Mega Chad on the the border between the modern countries of Chad Nigeria and Cameroon is a lake it's called Lake Chad and it's pretty small in the grand scheme of things it covers an area of about 770 Square Mi or about 2,000 square km which is about twice the size of Baxter State Park and it has a maximum depth of about 2 m or 6' 7 in which is about the height of Jason Tatum go Celtics or should I say go Celtics Greek Roman and even Celtics I'm sorry the what oh also update on the Philip Zea video you guys will be disappointed but not remotely surprised to know that Philip Zea has not changed one goddamn bit since I made my video Egyptian artifacts make absolutely zero sense and archaeologists might just be afraid of being wrong how is it the further oh bet you thought I couldn't fit a third outfit change in this video should I undo more buttons I'm practically suffocating in here so in the time since I recorded most of this video Philip Zeba has actually uploaded his uh uh response video it's uh 20 minutes long and uh this is the thumbnail oh yeah it's this one's going to be good so so I need to be totally honest I haven't actually watched this video yet because I have uh you know real work to do but I have looked a little bit at the interactions of it and let's just say that if we all had a hope in our hearts that Philip was actually going to turn around listen to any advice and make a wellth thought out and mature response uh we were wrong the like to dislike ratio is negative but you know there's not enough likes for me to really go off that uh so I think the comments actually speak a little bit better just looking at these comments here Philip it doesn't really seem like the consensus is that you had a wellth thought out and coherent argument oh and I'm not just like cherry-picking comments either that was the first five here's the next five and here's the next five and it here's the next five now obviously I'm going to do a response to this because I mean man how could I not Philip I doubt you're watching this and I doubt you even watched the video that you responded to but uh if you are I want to say that I haven't started scripting this video yet in fact I haven't even started watching it so there is still time to take this down and make a mature wellth thought out response I haven't seen it yet the record is still clean with me but you have about a week because I am really excited to start scripting this and once I've seen it the cat is out of the bag so all right we'll get back to the video now I just thought it was worth uh worth noting that this this happened while this Lake isn't all that large today at one time it was much much larger for this section the most valuable resource I used was called the West African Monsoon Dynamics inferred from abrupt fluctuation in Lake Mega Chad by Simon James Armitage Simon for taking the time to write this paper and help me on this video so much you sir are the real Mega Chad Lake Chad today is just the lowest point in what was once a massive lake bed the lake that did exist there Lake Mega Chad would have been 600 ft or 180 M deep and covered an area of 150,000 square miles or 400,000 square kilm this is larger than the Caspian SE this thing would have been absolutely gigantic and the drainage basin that fed it was 400,000 square mil or more than a million square kilm at the bottom of the lake bed archaeologists and geologists have found the remains of transverse Dunes now these Dunes actually predate the lake meaning that they were deposited before the water filled in around them and these Dunes are dated between 19 and 16,000 years before present now I I hear one or two of you asking how do you date a sand dune that's a great question quick tangent here the Dunes were dated with something called OSL dating or optically stimulated luminescence and the way that it works is it uses a bunch of science magic to figure out the last time that a grain of sand was in contact with sunlight so by looking at that you can figure out when it was covered and by proxy be able to date how long the structure has been here so this proves that the sand dunes at the bottom of Lake Chad would have been deposited before the start of the most recent African humid event which began right around that 16 15,000 years ago date by about 14,500 years ago the monsoon Reigns had managed to push this far into the African continent which means that rain had begun to fall in this catchment Basin eventually draining into Lake Chad at first this would have actually been two small lakes one in the Chad Basin where Lake Chad is now and one to the north in the bodell Basin which no longer has a lake in it as rain continued to fall year after year of monsoons would have eventually made these Lakes overflow their Banks and combine into one much larger Lake and eventually Mega Lake Chad would have filled to such a point that it would have hit the Mayo kebi overflow this point is about 325 m above sea level where Lake Chad would have then overflowed its banks and continued into another catchment Basin this overflow would have flowed into the benu and ner rivers and eventually out into the Atlantic Ocean Mega Lake Chad would have reached its Zenith about 11,500 years ago and evidence of the lustrin or lake sediments that are left over from its existence show that it would have been a rich ecosystem there are evidence of muscles seagrass fish and birds that would have once called this place home and for a lake that's larger than the Caspian Sea and existed for almost 10,000 years it's amazing to try and think about what sorts of ecosystems would have existed there that we just can't even see anymore today geologic evidence shows that the lake went through a few fluctuations throughout its time sometimes experiencing a few hundred years with lesser rainfall and other times experiencing more but like every other body of water in the green Sahara eventually something changed about 5,000 years ago the lake level fell dramatically and in the course of just around a thousand years one of the largest lakes on the planet disappeared and now that we have a picture of what the world would have been like around that time it's time to narrow it back in because we need to take a look at an archaeological site that changed the course of history just north of Lake Chad that's right ladies and gentlemen it's time for the gobero burials reprise there's a reason that I kicked this video off by talking about gobero because it's one of the best sort of proxies that we can use to piece together together what life would have been like in the African humid period in the 20-some years since the discoveries of gobero there have been six major excavations at the site at the time when the gobero archaeological site was inhabited it would have been receiving huge amounts of rain runoff from the air mountains just to the South oh sorry Northwest I believe water which would eventually run into the enormous Lake Chad and finally out to the Atlantic Ocean so in this land dominated by rivers and lakes and grassland and acacia trees let's zoom in and have a look at what what gobero would have been like gobero is located pretty much right next to the bed of an ancient Lake I can't find a name for it no one ever seemed to gave it give it a name and any of the paper so I'm going to call it Lake gobero sorry Lake gobero would have had an average depth of about 9 ft or 3 m and a maximum depth of 25 ft or 8 m right before the beginning of the African humid period when everything was as dry as it is now some huge sand dunes had formed in what was soon to become a lake bed the sand dunes at gobero just like the ones in Lake Chad are dated to about 16,000 years ago right at the beginning of the African humid period And as Monsoon after Monsoon swept the African continent and this little Lake gobero filled up it filled up the land around the sand dunes so the sand dunes weren't at the bottom of the lake they were like Sandy peninsulas that would have stuck out into the fresh water this would have been a really sick spot to be I want you to try and imagine these you know classic desert sand dunes but instead of just being sand and nothing in every direction they're covered in grass and there's fresh water all around you and there's migratory birds and you're in like this little isolated Peninsula sticking out into a big lake it's no Small Wonder that people wanted to live here not only with the food and natural resources but because it was some Prime real estate now the creation of these sand dunes about 16,000 years ago is known as phase one of the gobero site the very beginning of the African humid period gobero technically has eight sites associated with it they are labeled unrea as G1 through 8 and of these five contain evidence of human burials and human habitation archaeological evidence has proven that some of the first people to arrive at gobero was about 9,700 years ago and in the history of this site this is known as the start of phase 2 during phase 2 the gabero beachfront real estate company was home to a group of people called the keans the kiens like many other hunter gatherer groups at the time arrived at gobero to follow its natural resources they were drawn by the fish and cereal grains around these lakes and also by the other wild animals that were drawn to them as a source of fresh water easy hunting ground and the tools that they left behind shows just how well adapted they were to this environment the keian people hunted both fish and big game for fish they had Barbed harpoons made out of bone beautiful carvings that have instances that have survived all the way to this day not only this but they seem to use a type of spear embedded with microliths tiny flakes of nap stone that would make a spear Beyond lethal and the keans were the first to establish a cemetery at this site so let's have a look at what might be the most famous burial from gobero and potentially the most famous Kefi and burial of all time and that is the accordion man this is a skeleton that I mentioned at the beginning of this video and I told you I was going to get back to it actually didn't tell you that you just trusted me and I appreciate that about you the accordion Man dates back about 9,500 years and CT scans of his skeleton indicate that in life he probably stood about 6'2 now this is a theme that we see with many of the keian people they were really tall with their average height easily above 6 ft but you'll notice that the reason for his unusual name is because his skeleton is very compact like an accordion to put that in a little perspective of just truly how compact he is this 62 man his remains are now in a what is it oh yeah uh 10 in or 25 cm in diameter this dude got squished now this illustrates to archaeologists that he was tightly wrapped upon burial potentially with either ropes or animal skins or something to keep him really condensed and this is a theme that we actually see in other keian burials where it was customary to sort of wrap and uh bind the dead into kind of a little bundle before burying them but around 8,000 years ago something changed the keian kind of disappeared and all traces of them at the site begin to vanish this is the beginning of what is known as phase three of this [Music] site it's about a Thousand-Year period from 88,200 years ago to 7,200 years ago and during this period the area received a lot less rain and it seems like human habitation or semi-permanent human habitation ceased almost altogether but about 7,200 years years ago the Reigns returned and this kicked off phase 4 by this point a new culture of people had arrived and called the sand dunes at the beachfront Resort home and they were called the tarian people not only did they occupy the same Dunes as the keian but they ended up adding to the same Cemetery as far as I can tell one of the oldest of the tarian burials is a little more than 7,000 years old he's been given the nickname the turtle man which is understandable considering that he is buried in the top of a turtle carapus or a turtle shell uh post- production Milo here he was was actually buried on a turtle shell that was under his hip not in a turtle shell it was not a human-sized turtle or a turtle sized human for that matter it's an unusual burial that seems to bring in the compaction of the keian burials with the kind of sideways fetal position burials of the tarian culture I don't know if there's any evidence to suggest that these people were related to one another or how their cultures may have melded but I do think it's kind of interesting to see that this person was also bound really tightly and literally placed in a turtle shell to be buried the turtl man is the oldest Burial at gobero that has Grave offerings associated with it indicating the beginning of a change in culture the inclusion of grave Goods in a grave is something that indicates a lot about the culture that people lived in but beyond that the actual burial itself and the position that they're in will tell you a lot as well another that I mentioned earlier is the Halloween man who was part of the tarian culture and his remains also date to about 7,000 years ago now the most striking feature of him is the fact that his teeth are filed to points this is the oldest evidence that we have on the African continent of someone having their teeth filed to points which is a cultural practice that still exists in some parts of the continent even to this day the tarian people had pretty meticulous burials most of the individuals were laid to rest on their side in the fetal position take for example the also aptly named pot pillow man dating to about 5,500 years ago the pot pillow man another member of this culture was laid to rest with his head on a ceramic jar boo continuity error check my mic died so I had to film on a different day and all the changed is it is currently um 80° and my basement is full of water okay anyway that really has literally nothing to do with this video what were we talking about oh wow this is a really depressing time to have to come back into this Jesus one of the most dramatic examples of the keian burials at gobero is sometimes referred to as the Stone Age Embrace if you Google the Stone Age embrace you will also find a bunch of other archaeological discoveries called the Stone Age Embrace which is a little bit confusing but I don't know it was a catchy name so it's stuck it's the grave of three IND indviduals a woman and two children all holding hands it's a pretty heartbreaking burial and one that raises a lot of questions of all the burials at the gobero site this one speaks to me the most I think that as archaeologist it's important to look at any remains as those that once belong to a human and while it's easy to do that with most burials it's almost impossible not to with ones that are as heart-wrenching as this the obvious question that I'm sure all of us are asking is what happened here and we may never have the answer to that while there are arrowheads found associated with this grave they are grave goods and not lodged in any of the skeletons furthermore the skeletons show no signs of damage or stress which has led some to speculate that these three may be the result of a drowning whatever the story is it's something that we will never have the answer to but even though we may never have the answer it's important to think of these remains with the humanity that they deserve not only for what was potentially a mother and her children but for the other members of the community after all there's extensive evidence that this was a burial not just three bodies that sank to the bottom of a lake this shows us that this grave was made by other members of the community people who are not burying bones or you know archaeological fod they were burying their family members their friends perhaps a mother and her children further evidence for the reverence that the keian people had for their Dead comes from the grave known as the beautiful woman her skeleton dates back to about 6,000 years before present and soil analysis from beneath her remains shows that she was buried with Hol flowers a plant which scientists believe had the closest population about 100 m away in the air mountains meaning the community went to Great Lengths to bury one of their members on their side on a bed of flowers this gives us a tantalizing Peak into what the culture must have been like in this area at the time for example one of the graves contains the remains of an elderly woman who was buried wearing a necklace this necklace contained beads made out of Hippo Ivory and ostrich eggshell in another grave known as the bracelet girl the remains of a 10-year-old who passed away about 4,800 years ago is found wearing a bracelet made with a hippo inzer and lithics or stone tools found scattered around the site show evidence that there was extensive trade networks not only are there stone tools made of parent material found in the air mountains but there's also decorative pieces made of a mineral called amazonite this is a more rare material also found in the air mountains one of the more unusual artifacts recovered from the gabero site is known as the tarian disc it is made of the same green amazonite that was transported from the air mountains about 100 to 150 Mi to the north the artifact is nothing more than a small circular disc but there's currently no consensus on what it actually was some have suggested that it was a tool of some kind but it resembles no other tools in most lithic workshops others like myself think that it was more likely some sort of nonfunctional object either something pretty to look at maybe something used in ceremony or a object that could be traded and Bartered with with other groups in the green Sahara and just like the keian people the tarians Left Behind huge mittens a midden is the fancy archaeology word for a giant pile of garbage it actually provides some of the best information that you can get in an archaeological site both the keian and tarian middens tell us a lot about their diet in these piles of refu archaeologists have found the remains of a myriad of creatures animals like catfish Turtles elephants wart hogs wilderbeast and uh what was the other one elephants did I already say elephants elephants as well as towards the end of the occupation of the site domesticated animals like cattle this history of the animals in the green Sahara is something which is corroborated by archaeological sites and rock carvings all across the desert and they help us paint a wonderful picture of what the world would have looked like when these people lived there take for example at the mesac plateau in Libya where there is this beautiful carving of two alligators it's believed that this carving depicts a mother and its baby or the much more famous toose giraffe this carving is in the air mountains of ner the very same mountains which provided the lithics and amazonite to those that were once living at gobero archaeologists and paleoecologists speculate that this shows a male and slightly smaller female and the carvings are absolutely massive measuring 20 ft or 6 m in length in fact they are the largest animal petroglyphs currently known but as the climate started to change and drive people out of the green Sahara the way that people lived also had to change and the carvings of the African humid period actually outlined this very well as people began to rely less and less on Wild game they had to find new ways to feed themselves which led many groups of people to begin to rely on animal husbandry this is known as the African pastoral period take for example this carving known as the crying cows in Algeria it's a beautiful carving and it's dated to around the start of the African humid period about 7,000 years ago Legend says that a herder is the one that carved the crying cows and that he was grieving the loss of his herd after a particularly harsh drought it is not remotely impossible that an oral history has been handed down year after year after year for thousands of years throughout this region telling the story of the crying cows granted we will probably never know the ground truth of these carvings but given what we know about the African human humid period and how long oral memories can be passed down it sounds like it actually could have a shred of Truth in it the former hunters and gatherers of the African humid period began to rely more and more on agriculture and animal husbandry but no matter how much they began to refine those techniques they were running from something that was unescapable Humanity's true great equalizer from the beginning of time to this day the climate about 4,000 years ago the last acacia tree at gobero withered dropped its leaves and died the Earth's wobble was rapidly returning to Center once again year after year after year the monsoons got a little bit smaller their rains reached a little bit farther and by about 3,000 years ago they had ended all together at gobero this period can be seen about 4,200 years ago when the last human inhabitants Departed the site for the very last time the final iteration of gobero known as phase 4 today all that's left in this region is windblown sand and dry riverbeds that would be lucky to even see a drop of water in a single year it's the only way we have ever known the Sahara a vast empty expansive desert containing almost nothing the African humid period may seem like something which is intangible to us but all across the Sahara desert today there are little Shadows glimpses into the ghosts of the monsoon it is really difficult to view our world as something that changes the human lifespan is so short that most most of the change that happens on our planet is something that we can never really fathom this is when it's important to zoom out instead of looking at you right now in the world that we live in I want you to look at your place in the timeline of humanity throughout the 150,000 years that homo sapiens have walked the Earth we have experienced all kinds of terrible stuff we have experienced ice ages and sea level rise volcanoes meteors freezes thaws droughts fires tornadoes you name it we've been there but these things that happen on a grand scale are really hard to grasp but no matter how hard they are to grasp the trauma of climate change that Humanity carries with it is something which can be seen all throughout our world and there's actually some really good examples of this from the green Sahara take for example Ethiopia in East Africa and Mali in West Africa these two groups are pretty different from one another they speak different languages they have different Customs they believe in different things despite their differences and being divided by literally the largest desert on the planet they have a few words that are really really similar to one another these two groups both share a very similar word for hippo and this is a pattern that can be found in a couple different cultures throughout Africa lingering relics that suggest that all of these different people had cultural ancestors that once spoke a language in the green Sahara cultural ancestors who were exposed to the immense biodiversity of what was once an enormous grassland this is why teaching history is something that is so important because even though history is all the old stuff it really impacts how we live today by understanding the past we can better interpret the future and we we do ourselves a disservice by not adequately teaching Science and History by teaching people these things you give them the tools to be able to interpret it for themselves I've said a million times before when talking about pseudo science that the number one thing to combat pseudo science is education it's not me sitting here dunking on people it's giving you guys the tools that you need to teach your friends how archaeology works the amount of conspiracies that revolve around poorly interpreted geology blows my mind and it blows my mind even more to know that none of this would happen if people had had a single geology G Class but the thing about history and science is that it's something that requires a lot of work to be able to understand science is not the type of field that you can just show up in and be like yeah I think it's like that and so it's like that this is also why I believe people have a really challenging time conflating modern climate change with the way that the climate has changed in the past because we don't have any education about this stuff but if we were to have any chance at succeeding in the future we need to be able to look back at people as people not as primitive Barbarian Savages or highly advanced atlanteans or as the ever Pious indigenous we do so much to view our ancestors as something other than us we either pedestalize them to these ridiculous standards or we crush them under our boot heels trying to claim that we have somehow gotten better than they were but the truth of the matter is that neither of those are the case the truth of it is that they were just like us these people who called the Sahara Desert home were not atlanteans or cavemen they were people like you and I people who thought like us people who cared like us who believed like like us people who buried their dead on a bed of flowers it's important as archaeologists and historians to not lose our Humanity I want you to not only think about how these stories impact where you are in the human story what we can learn from them what you relate to about them or what stuck with you the most but I also want you to think about what this means for us in the future the tarians the keian and countless other unnamed once existed there was people like you people like me people like anyone who is watching this video but today all that's left not only of their culture but of their world is a vast expanse of sand every ruin on the planet is left behind by a culture who once thought themselves invincible and truly the most human part of it all is that every single one of them has always thought that what happened to them could never happen to us ladies and gentlemen I'd like to thank you for watching this video I hope you found this deep dive entertaining and who knows maybe even a little bit informational if you like what I do here and your returning viewer welcome back and thank you for joining me for another one and if you're new here whether you're just checking this out while you have lunch or you're putting on in the background while you're clean your room I'd like to welcome you too look at you thinking I couldn't fit another continuity error in this video pathetic if you did enjoy me keeping you company consider checking out another one of my videos or if you have a friend that likes to play long-winded videos in the background while they do household chores feel free to send this video to them consider it like tipping the Bell hop I make a video that you get to watch for free and all I ask is you help boost boost boost the algorithm a little bit helps what you do helps what I do everybody wins in the end and lastly I like to give a huge thank you to my patrons on patreon patrons get early adree access to all of my videos and all of your names will be in the credit of this video as a token of my appreciation if you'd like to become a patron link to that is in the description of this video ladies and gentlemen I think that's all I have to tell you today I'd like to thank you all very much for watching this video my name is Milo Rossy remember to stay curious stay inquisitive and most importantly remember to stay hydrated I don't don't think I can think of something better than that [Music] cool yay yeah