Science: The Fertile Sahara

Some 10,000 years ago, when glaciers chilled northern Europe, the Sahara desert was a fertile, well-watered land. Among the most favored parts of it must have been the Tassili-N-Ajjer, a plateau about 900 miles southeast of Algiers. Today the region is one of the driest deserts on earth and almost uninhabited, but in prehistoric and early historic times it boiled with vigorous life. Last week French Anthropologist Henri Lhote was back in Algiers with proof of what Tassili-N-Ajjer (which means river plateau) was like while the rains still came.

Four Hundred Paintings. Dr. Lhote took four young painters to copy colored drawings in cramped caves. Like stone-age Europeans, the early people of the Sahara had their holy shrines deep underground, and they decorated them with magical drawings long after Europeans had given up the custom. The Lhote expedition copied faithfully 400 cave paintings. Ten thousand more were found but not copied.

No high civilization ever developed in the Sahara, but the Tassili region seems to have been influenced for thousands of years by more advanced lands. The earliest paintings in the caves are primitive. Slightly later drawings are more sophisticated. Dr. Lhote believes that the ancient people of Taasili developed an independent artistic style not derived from cave art elsewhere.

Tassili, though remote, was not alone in the ancient world. Some of the drawings show great troops of cattle, proving that the domestication of animals, one of man’s greatest achievements, had reached Tassili, probably through Egypt.

Camels & Masks. Other signs of Egyptian influence are drawings of Nile boats and of bearded strangers with shields and spears and feathers in their hair. Then appear camels and horses. The war chariot —that great invention of ancient warfare —was at least heard of in the depths of the Sahara. Many of the drawings have not been interpreted yet. They show drinking bouts and hunting scenes, priests sacrificing a bull, a “ballet” of 40 ostriches and humans wearing animal masks.

Besides the copied drawings, the expedition brought back tools, mortars for grinding colors, personal ornaments, even pearls from some distant sea. Some of the finds contain carbon and can be dated by radioactive carbon 14. When this has been done, and when scholars have studied the drawings and artifacts, a history of a sort can be written of the fertile river plateau that slowly died of thirst after the glaciers melted.