By Jo Nova
Cold is the Catastrophe
A hotter world might not be so horrible. Back in the early Holocene, 10,000 years ago, rivers flowed in the middle of the Sahara desert, and they were filled with fish. The photo above is what remains of Takarkori Lake today. If only climate change could bring back the fish?
While we were distracted in 2020, researchers published a paper about an trove of bones and body parts they had dug out of a cave in Southwest Libya, which is roughly the middle of the Sahara today. Surprisingly they found 17,551 bones, and even more surprisingly, 80% of them were from fish.
The people who dined there were catching tilapia and clariid catfish, and sometimes the odd mud turtle, mollusc and a crocodile or two. The lake (pictured above) is about 6 kilometers from the cave (below), and all the bones appear to be human refuse. It’s kind of the ultimate archaeological FOGO dump.
Somehow, this restaurant that stayed open for 6,000 years left behind layer after layer of undisturbed dining history. Gradually, over thousands of years the diners ate less fish, and more beef, goat and mutton.
Amazingly, 17,000 bits of bone and bits were found in an area of just 150 meters square. Somehow, against the odds, the researchers were able to identify every single fish bone. It seems astonishing, except the odds were 50:50 that each bone was either a Tilapia or a Clariid catfish. The residents may have been a bit tired of eating the same two fish.
While the rivers and wetlands may have had a lot of fish, there wasn’t much variety.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0228588
The authors, Wim van Neer et al, speculate that the fish probably spread to these lakes via massive flooding events that washed them over the land. (Imagine how big those floods would have to be?) They wonder if the odd bird might have dropped some fish eggs, but don’t think it is as likely. Apparently sometimes even storms can pick up fish and fling them far away. If humans ever did control the climate and fix it in its current state, they would stop life returning to the desert and call it a “win” for the environment. Crazy eh?
During this hot Holocene era, there were many other rivers across the Sahara that don’t flow there today. The lakes near Takarkori dried up during the sudden shocking cold snap 8,200 years ago, but came back after a few centuries. (Just more climate change!) Sometime around 5,500 years ago they dried up for good (or bad, if you were a nomadic herder).
One river nearby managed to keep flowing until Roman times, about 2,000 years ago.
Map of Saharan rivers and water systems of the Holocene. Fig 14. Extant occurrence of selected aquatic species (fish, crocodile, and turtle) in North Africa waterways.
Crocodylus distribution has to be considered continuous in the present waterways south of the Sahara desert and along the Nile River south of Aswan.
The remnants at the cave cover an era 6,000 years long
It is somewhat sobering to be reminded of just how many generations have come and gone, and how different their lives must have been. What would they think if they saw the barren desert now?
The first humans to live in the cave arrived about 10,000 years ago. Permanent settlements appeared around 8,300 years ago with dairy cattle arriving 800 years later. By 6,000 years ago the site was used for brief visits by herders of goats and sheep during the winter.
From the paper:
The first inhabitants at Takarkori rock shelter were early Holocene hunter-gatherer-fishers locally called “Late Acacus” (LA1-3: ca. 10,200–8000 cal BP). Archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence indicates prolonged, albeit seasonal, residential occupation and a delayed-return system of resource exploitation [13, 33, 34, 35].
Stone structures of different size and functions (huts, windbreaks, platforms, etc.) and large fireplaces, together with large grinding stones and abundant pottery also point to semi-sedentary lifestyle, as indicated by other coeval sites in the region, such as Ti-n-Torha East, Uan Afuda and Uan Tabu [7, 36, 37]. The earliest evidence of Pastoral Neolithic herders (EP1-2) dates to ca. 8300 cal BP, mostly represented by the burial of women and children [38].
A full pastoral economy based on cattle exploitation including dairying is attested from approximately 7100 years cal BP [39], when the shelter is occupied seasonally (MP1-2), likely from the end of the rainy season and during the dry winter [13, 40]).
Nomadic herders (LP1, ca. 5900–4650 years cal BP), mostly focussing on small livestock (sheep/goat) rather than cattle, briefly camped at Takarkori during the winter, using much part of the area for penning the animals, with a thick, hardened layer of ovicaprine dung closing the sequence
The current Sahara desert
Just to remind us of how incredibly vast it is:
The press release:
Fish in the Sahara? Yes, in the early Holocene
ScienceDaily, February 2020
Catfish and tilapia make up many of the animal remains uncovered in the Saharan environment of the Takarkori rock shelter in southwestern Libya, according to a study published February 19, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Wim Van Neer from the the Natural History Museum in Belgium, Belgium and Savino di Lernia, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and colleagues.
Today, the Saharan Tadrart Acacus mountains are windy, hot, and hyperarid; however, the fossil record shows that for much of the early and middle Holocene (10,200 to 4650 years BP), this region was humid and rich in water as well as life, with evidence of multiple human settlements and diverse fauna.
Rock shelters within the Tadrart Acacus preserve not only significant floral and faunal remains, but also significant cultural artifacts and rock art due to early Holocene occupation of these shelters. In this study, the authors worked with the Libyan Department of Antiquities in excavating parts of the Takarkori rock shelter to identify and date animal remains found at this site and investigate shifts in the abundance and type of these animal remains over time.
Fish remains made up almost 80 percent of the entire find overall, which numbered 17,551 faunal remains total (19 percent of these were mammal remains, with bird, reptile, mollusc, and amphibian remains the last 1.3 percent). All of the fish and most of the other remains were determined to be human food refuse, due to cut marks and traces of burning — the two fish genera at Takarkori were identified as catfish and tilapia.
Based on the relative dates for these remains, the amount of fish decreased over time (from 90 percent of all remains 10,200-8000 years BP versus only 40 percent of all remains 5900-4650 years BP) as the number of mammal remains increased, suggesting the inhabitants of Takarkori gradually focused more on hunting/livestock. The authors also found the proportion of tilapia specifically decreased more significantly over time, which may have been because catfish have accessory breathing organs allowing them to breathe air and survive in shallow, high-temperature waters — further evidence that this now-desert environment became less favorable to fish as the aridity increased.
The authors add: “This study reveals the ancient hydrographic network of the Sahara and its interconnection with the Nile, providing crucial information on the dramatic climate changes that led to the formation of the largest hot desert in the world. Takarkori rock shelter has once again proved to be a real treasure for African archaeology and beyond: a fundamental place to reconstruct the complex dynamics between ancient human groups and their environment in a changing climate.
REFERENCE
“Wim Van Neer, Francesca Alhaique, Wim Wouters, Katrien Dierickx, Monica Gala, Quentin Goffette, Guido S. Mariani, Andrea Zerboni, Savino di Lernia. Aquatic fauna from the Takarkori rock shelter reveals the Holocene central Saharan climate and palaeohydrography. PLOS ONE, 2020; 15 (2): e0228588 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0228588
Very interesting. Perhaps there are some parallels with Lake Mungo in NSW, which dried up somewhat earlier, about 15,000 years ago I think.
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At the last glacial maximum, around 18,000 years BP, Lake Mungo began to empty when the Lachlan changed its course.
‘Fed by mountain snow-melt, the rivers carry high spring/summer flows and large amounts of sediment, but the Lachlan River shrinks back from the lakes and dissipates onto the barren plains.
‘Willandra Lakes gradually dry out, starting in the south and moving progressively north. Groundwater levels remain high for a time, but the lakes never fill again.’
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“Apparently sometimes even storms can pick up fish and fling them far away.”
My father told me that his father told him: In 1893 he was shearing at Brindley Park at Merriwa (where the shed holds 5,000 wooly sheep) when there came a storm. After the storm there were small fish in the counting out pens. That is all I know, but I have spent my life wondering how this could happen.
The shed is only 200 metres from the river, but it is a small river. The inference that I got was that the fish came from the sky. So, is it possible that a waterspout picked those fish up out of the ocean and carried them in a storm 150 km inland?
Even if they could I can’t imagine that the fish would survive the low temperature. But their eggs might.
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Shield shrimp can lie dormant in dry clay pans for years, only emerging when the rare floods occur. Had something like this on the Nullarbor.
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I’ve seen them swimming up the water flowing across the ground after a heavy storm. They are small but very quick (faster than you can run). However it’s very rare for them to get stranded. As soon as the flow eases they return to the creek, they only need about 5mm of water.
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Yes, I suppose that might be a possibility. The storm might have created a continuous stream to the river.
In a flood time I have seen eel tailed catfish trying to get up into the table drain by the road in the Mooki at Pine Ridge.
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Yes Ted, out in Sturt’s Stony Desert it often rains tiny fish.
The shallow puddles on the claypans are full of them.
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It must have been quick leaving than Man fishing without water.
sarc.
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How about – The tracks are believed to be around 95 million years old, dating back to the Cretaceous period.
Lark Quarry Dinosaur Tracks
Located 110 km southwest of Winton, Queensland, Australia, Lark Quarry Conservation Park is home to the world’s only known dinosaur stampede site. The site features over 3,300 fossilized dinosaur tracks, showcasing the chaotic scene of a prehistoric stampede.
As I keep saying to any Greenie – “There are NOT any Dinosaurs there now & Humans were not involve!”
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At the dinosaur museum, outside Winton, there is a a very large shed containing dinosaur tracks imprinted in mud. I don’t recall where this came from. Is it part of what you describe?
The exhibition was recovered from an area a long way from the museum and reassembled as in a giant jigsaw of some 3000 pieces.
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Paleontology is slow to change its view of the evidence . There is lots of evidence of major changes to both climate and hydrology in both the recent and distant past .There is evidence we have had major events (floods, volcanos and impacts) that have nearly wiped out entire ecosystems and are ignoring the probable causes in favor of fantasy . Sooner or later reality will come knocking and we won’t be ready…
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The Talissi frescos indicate life in the Sahara about 6-9,000 years ago.
It was during the West Africa humid period – a pointless idea as the Sahara was wet. There is a youtube (which I am too lazy to reference) claiming it was due to a Milankovitch cycle.
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The Holocene climate maximum produced a warm wet phase, the West African humid period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_event#/media/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
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This seems to be a different video and about much more recent times. Interesting how written history and science often seem to be from two different planets.
No idea if they agree with the map above at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGqvWVUdUoQ
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Shows just how adaptable the human animal is. People lived there when it was a wetland, and the descendants of those people adapted with the environment every step of the way and learned how to live in a desert. Which further proves the ridiculousness of the apocalyptic claims about a degree or two of temperature rise rendering large parts of the earth uninhabitable.
Same goes for sea level rise panic. If the stone age residents of Doggerland could adapt when it flooded and became the English Channel a few thousand years ago, we can adapt to losing a bit of seafront real estate if/when it happens.
You know what we can’t adapt to though?
Snowball earth. If we slide back into an ice age, plants stop growing and food chains collapse. No amount of central heating and snow plows can fix that. Sure, we could build greenhouses, but not enough to feed eight billion people. An ice age is the one thing that could make Malthusians dreams come true.
So in the interest of preventing Snowball earth, I say we start burning MORE dirty black stuff and sending CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
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Me too. Yesterday there was a bit of a stoush between climate alarmists and realists on X. Nothing new. One alarmist claimed that previous atmospheric CO2 levels of 150-300ppm were ideal and therefore present escalating levels would be disastrous. Quite amazing the ignorance of these people, when at those previous levels of CO2, most life of earth would be very limited.
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Got a link?
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Doggerland was in the North Sea, not the English Channel. The inhabitants presumably sailed to Britain or to the Continent when the sea level rose.
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They didn’t sail into Britain or the continent. They walked. I took hundreds/thousands of years to be inundated (though there is a theory that a massive landslide in Norway triggered a tidal wave ‘tipping point’). When the marshland they were used to living in slowly became swampland, they picked up and moved to a more elevated, drier area. When that place got too swampy, their children and grandchildren moved again. Eventually, after many generations of trying to make a go of it, their descendants found themselves in Britain or on the continent.
There was no mass evacuation like in a disaster movie. It was a slow barely noticeable trickle over generations. Because ‘sea level rise’ doesn’t happen overnight. It’s slow and manageable, either by leaving low-lying areas or building a system of sea walls and pumps (like the Dutch started doing in the 13th century AD).
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Fish swimming in the Sahara? No more amazing than Joe Biden putting on a Trump/MAGA hat.
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And what fed the rivers was the annual Monsoon in North Africa, as in India. Cooling ended the evaporation and the monsoon and the fertile land turned to desert. The idea that heat produces deserts is the reverse of the truth. All water comes from the ocean. Without enough evaporation, all land is a desert.
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And I need to point out that temperature rise is not limitless in a water world, as in the tropics. A water world (74% of the planet is covered by water) the temperature is self limiting by clouds and water vapour.
Consider this graph of CO2 and temperature vs time. What is the outstanding characteristic? Those with an electronics background will notice the ‘clipping’ (temperature in blue) and the hard temperature limit of 22.0C. Like Zener diode.
So we do not need to fear heat which brings CO2 and H2O and dinosaurs and abundant, massive growth. We need to fear the cold which kill rain and so all our food. Because if we don’t eat plants, we eat things which eat plants. And all plants come entirely from CO2 and H2O. Global hotter is far, far better than just local hotter which just indicates a lack of water and vegetation.
The world is counter intuitive. Only on a local scale do we associate heat with lack of water, but it is a consequence, not a cause.
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As Dr Patrick Moore, the PhD ecologist who started Greenpeace noted, humans, the naked apes, will die from hypothermia in 20C. It means we evolved at a time when the temperature was higher, as shown in the historical temperature graph just a few million years ago.
The Sahara (Arabic for desert) only exists because the temperature over the oceans dropped, which makes the temperature over the desert much higher because there are no clouds, no rivers, no lakes and no vegetation.
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All water comes from the oceans. ALL weather. All storms. And yet all people care about is the temperature where they live, which is not the point at all. All the stored surface heat in the world is in the gigantic heat bank which are the worlds oceans with 1600x the heat capacity of the thin turbulent, radiating air above which heats up and cools down massively every day. Unless there is plenty of water vapour and clouds and it rains every afternoon, as in the tropical jungles.
Why are we scared of increasing global temperature? It will make the whole world greener, as NASA agrees.
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Yep
One of my favorite techniques for getting warmunists to think about cold is to ask them if a healthy human can live for 24 hours in the hottest place on earth (Death Valley) while naked and exposed to the elements. The answer is yes. As long as they have water, a human can survive there naked as a jaybird for days. Then ask the same question about the coldest place on earth (Antarctica). The answer is a resounding no. You would go into hypothermia within 15 minutes and would be a human pop-sickle within an hour.
Homo sapiens love heat. Cold not so much.
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Joanne,
Big surprise, a nitpick:
Perhaps you’re spelling it this way for the comfort of readers in the USA, but in Australian, British and even Canadian English, metre is the standard spelling.
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I think Jo has the dictionary set to US, going from the use of “z” instead of “s”…
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My take was that Jo had decided that using the American spelling would make our American friends feel at home, whereas anybody with a modern Australian education wouldn’t notice the difference.
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We Australians are raised on both UK/US, The Goodies and Gilligan. But we had Skippy too.
Forgive me, I read and spell both ways, and don’t notice.
The spellcheck is set to US (David used to live there, and I like z, but I flip UK/US autonomically). The paper itself spells it “kilometers” and I probably just copied that.
But I can see your point Robert. If I was thinking of our US readers I probably would have said 4 miles. It does seem odd to spell it the US way when they are so non-committal with the unit.
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I’ve always wondered how the Yanks did all their calculations with imperial measurements to land a man on the Moon and get him back to Earth.
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Mr. Brisbane: I wasn’t part of the team, but I surmise that they inched their way forward.
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And physicists, scientists. Meters are used universally in measurement as well. Kilometres are very rare. It’s a bit like grey and gray. But that’s a grey area.
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Ok, so that kooky gang at the UK National Physical Laboratory are just pulling our legs. What larks!
I’m able to avoid US incursions like “meters”, “sulfur” and “aluminum”. Put it down to conservatism.
However, I’m more libertarian than conservative, and uphold Joanne’s right to spell these words any way she pleases. I was just pointing it out in case it was accidental. I’ve had friends thank me (in a mortified way) for pointing out when a “gotten” has slipped out. That’s the spirit of it.
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American spelling goes for meter, sulfur and aluminum. I’m English by birth so I go for metre, sulphur and aluminium. Each to his or her own.
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Yes, but it was the Americans who made so much aluminum. They say aluminum. They do not say aluminium. It’s a different spelling because it’s a different word where meter and metre and sulfur and sulphur are homophones.
But it was the world’s most expensive metal created by chemistry when first discovered. Famously Napoleon III had a rattle made from aluminium. And a 3 kg. pyramid of this extraordinarily rare metal was placed on top of the new Washington Memorial(pyramid) around 1888.
The development of electrolytic production/reduction simultaneously in the US and Northern France made the metal ultra cheap. Alcoa started in the US and are now world wide. And they called it Aluminum. Americans have never heard of Aluminium.
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And the discoverer used both spellings.. “A January 1811 summary of one of Davy’s lectures at the Royal Society mentioned the name aluminium as a possibility. The next year, Davy published a chemistry textbook in which he used the spelling aluminum. Both spellings have coexisted since.” But the British discoverer called it aluminum.
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I’m an Aluminium girl, and since it starts with Bauxite and we are the largest producer in the world, I think we own that spelling. 😉
Dang, is Alcoa American? It’s a West Australian landmark like a Jarrah forest. That’s a headspin.
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I THINK you will find that Davy proposed several names for the metal that he hoped to produce from Alum (hydrated Al+ sulphate). “Alumium”, and “Aluminum” were two. I have read that “Aluminium” was an international attempt to achieve some standardisation in naming conventions (like Sodium, Potasium, Chromium, et cetera, et cetera).
So all of the names (but one) were British; the last was international. The Americans just did not get the email.
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I think it was in the ’90s that there was a big international agreement amongst chemists to standardise spellings for the elements. The controversial ones were sulphur, aluminium and caesium. The Americans gave way on “aluminium” and “caesium”, and got “sulfur” adopted in exchange. The only real effect was that some subset of Euros and Brits started using “sulfur”. Hardly surprising that the American chemists didn’t exactly embrace the changes they’d agreed to. International diplomacy at its finest.
Here’s the periodic table as it stands today, still with those agreed spellings.
Keep it quiet for the people of Sulphur Springs, Texas.
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There are 1.35 Billion English speakers.
Of these perhaps 1.2billion use the US spelling. The US, Canada, India and a few more.
Remember British spelling was so influenced by the push to make it more French. So coff became cough. All the rude words were Anglo Saxon. It was a form of snobbery. You can say situpon, derriere but not bum. Monty Python had fun with it.
All done by one committee.
Yes, American Noah Webster fixed it and reversed the committee logic with phonics. So theatre became theater. He could not undo cough, bough, through, thought, though,enough,.. But as a teacher of English to migrants in America, he railed at silly spelling like colour instead of color.
When English spelling is not explicable, blame the French. In fact blame the upper class British who like Upper Class people throughout Europe preferred French. Henry VIII spoke French. The Russian aristocracy spoke French. And contracts which were universally in Latin were changed to French. Then German became the fashion. And finally English.
Perversely the British missed out on the metric system (as did Australia and the US) because of one vote on one committee by a man who hated the French.
All the military now use metric. Metres are now archaic apart from some diehards. And the Americans still say Fore Head as two words. Don’t get me started on Leiutenant (pronounced lefttenant even though it has nothing to do with left and right)
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I still contend that the English composed the language and the Americans decomposed it. I also differentiate between meter (an instrument for measuring something) and metre (a measurement of distance).
[Russell wins. That’s a good point. -Jo]
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When I was a kid in Canada in the 1960s-70s, shopping malls were called Shopping Centers, but sometime in the 1980s they changed the spelling to ‘Shopping Centres’. It happened gradually over the years, but now you almost never see any other spelling than ‘Shopping Centre’ anywhere in Canada.
I have never found an explanation of who did this, or why.
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In Germany they spell Kilometer.
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In Ohio?
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You would have to wonder why a bunch of archeologists from Belgium and Italy would want to got to the middle of the arid, extremely hot Sahara desert in “western friendly” Libya to complete a dig? Not exactly scenic either. Getting volunteers for that job must have been difficult. From the photo the only plus is that maybe the dig was under shade. Luxury! Amazing though, climate change created the vast Sahara desert, the natural kind of climate change (the only kind). Whereas today, the alarmists are worried about a few mm SLR or maybe a tenth of a degree temperature increase. None of which can be reliably verified anyway. Whereas, here we have the Sahara Desert, nearly half the African continent.
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What will they call ‘The Greens’ when we revert to desert or indeed waterlogged
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Naive and Stupid as of now.
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Ghat is a small city that is nearby but at an altitude of 668 m above sea level. It’s summer months average a maximum of 40+ (Aug 39.9). It’s record temperature is only 46. I’m assuming that down where the river was, it is 3-4 degrees hotter from a 6 K/km lapse rate. Dry though. Bearable as long as there is enough water to drink.
So when the area was more humid and the world was hotter, cave dwellers were thriving, making pottery and weaving baskets.
What happened to that old assertion that most of the warming would be at higher latitudes and altitudes? What do the utterly useless models say now? That it’s entirely possible for everywhere on the globe to warm twice as fast as the average?
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Child of Late Acacus hunter-gatherer-fisher folk, sitting by a small fire under a rock shelter near Takarkori Lake, asks:
Mum, Dad, what’s for lunch?
Catfish.
Mum, Dad, what’s for dinner?
Catfish.
Mum, Dad, what’s for dessert?
Catfish.
Children these days just don’t know what catfish is.
Is there not, even today, a YUGE aquifer under the desert sands of Libya, which a former leader tapped & piped to the cities along the Mediterranean shores? The leader is gone yet the deep, cold, pure water is still there… along with black gold (hydrocarbons).
Now THAT’S a ‘lucky’ country – apart from the USUK chaos which kicked off 20 years ago.
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Then, 10,000 years ago, a miracle occurred. The discovery of agriculture.
Soon it was
Mum, Dad, what’s for lunch?
Porridge.
Mum, Dad, what’s for dinner?
Porridge.
Mum, Dad, what’s for dessert?
Porridge.
At least in Scotland. All the meat went to England, which is why the Scots eat Haggis. Offal with porridge.
Things have improved in Scottish cuisine. You can now buy a deep fried Mars bar. And McDonalds. A haggis burger?
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“Thanks again Jo for linking to the very wet, fertile Sahara during the much warmer early Holocene. But the previous Eemian Interglacial was 8 C wamer than our Holocene and bones of Hippos, Rhinos and Elephants etc were found whan carrying out work on the Trafalgar monument.
And bones of Lions and other big cats have also been found in the UK and Europe and dating to the hotter Eemian.
And Hippos survived in the UK until about 80,000 years ago.
See the quote and link.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2014/september/hippos-make-splash-return-river-thames.html
“The sculpture was inspired by a children’s storybook about a hippo, and by the variety of material that washes up on the banks of the Thames each day. The artist was amazed to discover that hippos once swam in the Thames and that their remains have been found underneath what is now Trafalgar Square”.
“Animals such as hippos, lions and elephants were a common sight in Britain 125,000 years ago. At this time, the banks of the Thames extended as far as Trafalgar Square, and the warmer climate created the perfect conditions for these exotic creatures”.
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BTW the average temperature for the UK today in 2024 is 9.24 c and far colder than the Eemian 130 K to 115 K years ago.
Average temps for the USA and Germany are only slightly warmer than the UK and Canada is a very cold minus -4 c. And 50% of Canadians live in the southerly V shaped pocket east of the Great Lakes. I wonder why? sarc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_yearly_temperature
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BTW Australia’s average temp is 22 c and NZ 10.46 c.
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Heard a radio interview about Essex farmers, just north of the Thames, now growing grapes and getting excited about their wines, which was only possible because of the CCCCCCrisis.
If only they’d dug their posts a little deeper, they may have discovered 2,000 year-old remains of Roman viticulture and murals depicting Bacchanalian festivities with a little graffiti saying, ‘Beat you to it’.
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Southern areas of the UK, Sussex, Kent , etc, have been growing wine grapes for decades.
Some of the white wines are considered excellent.
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The Romans had vines near Hadrian’s Wall, very much ‘oop North’.
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Where I was born which is Holmfirth West Yorkshire about 180 miles north of London there is now a vineyard. From what I’ve read their reds are not too bad but their whites not so good.
https://holmfirthvineyard.com/
The mast at the top of the hill in the distance is the Holme Moss TV tower.
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>Where I was born which is Holmfirth West Yorkshire
That’s where my maternal grandparents came from.
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You might be interested in watching this then.
Holmfirth, West Yorkshire【4K】| Town Centre Walk 2021.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1tE4Zj2wbo
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Also giraffes in the Thames valley and hippos in the Rhine delta.
Also rhinoceriii in Yorkshire – no idea when such hard headed and obstinate creatures went extinct (if they ever did).
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Giraffes in the Thames Valley? That’s a bit of a stretch.
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There is evidence that the early Holocene in Australia was wetter than present and reached peak moisture around 7,600 years ago.
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Where are the indigenous historians when we need them?
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Still in India 😉
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This sort of finding makes a complete mockery of the instrumental records that are barely more than a century or two in length.
My understanding is that the deserts are on the downside of Hadley Cells so this would mean that these circulation cells were in a different location when the sahara was wet and green.
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If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it five hundred times: It’s not the warmth we need to fear; it’s the cold.
We are in a temporary warm spell in the middle of an ice age. Actually probably not yet the middle, that’s a couple million years in the future.
Anything that fends off the next glacial outbreak for a few decades or centuries is a blessing. Warmth is life. Cold is death.
Get a grip already.
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May/June issue 2014
https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/201403/last.lakes.of.the.green.sahara.htm
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I THINK you will find that Davy proposed several names for the metal that he hoped to produce from Alum (hydrated Al+ sulphate). “Alumium”, and “Aluminum” were two. I have read that “Aluminium” was an international attempt to achieve some standardisation in naming conventions (like Sodium, Potasium, Chromium, et cetera, et cetera).
So all of the names (but one) were British; the last was international. The Americans just did not get the email.
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🙂
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Surely watery areas in the Sahara can not be a new discovery –
Remember in the movie “The English Patient”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116209/
The references to “swimmers” in the pre-historic cave art.
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Aluminium vs Aluminum spelling. I thought for years it was a typist’s error. I just checked perplexity.ai search engine which informs, no, not a typographical error.
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The Sahara was once a fertile area that supported thriving human communities. A study of core samples has revealed that the ancient climate of North Africa underwent rapid desertification and climate change that transformed the region from a humid, subtropical landscape to a desert in a matter of years. This occurred around 4200 BC and returned to the same desert conditions that dominated the area 13,000 years earlier.
As the climate began to change, the Sahara region became arid and vegetation died out. With nothing to hold the soil in place, wind action was able to remove all the fine sediment until only sand and rock remained.
The transition from the mid-Holocene climate to the current one was driven by changes in the Earth’s orbit and the tilt of the Earth’s axis. About 9,000 years ago, the Earth’s tilt was 24.14 degrees, compared to today’s 23.45 degrees, and perihelion (the point in Earth’s orbit closest to the Sun) occurred in late July, compared to early January. At that time, the Northern Hemisphere received more summer sunlight, which amplified the African and Indian summer monsoons.
The changes in Earth’s orbit occurred gradually, while the climate and vegetation of North Africa evolved rapidly. German researcher Claussen and his colleagues believe that various feedback mechanisms within Earth’s climate system amplified and modified the effects of the orbital changes. By modelling the impact of climate, oceans, and vegetation both separately and in various combinations, the researchers concluded that the oceans played only a minor role in the desertification of the Sahara.
Wadi El Hitan (Whale Valley), in Egypt, contains the fossil remains of an extinct suborder of whales. The valley was evidently part of a shallow marine basin 40-50 million years ago. Desertification has helped preserve and reveal a huge amount of fossils.
Alessandro13
From Quora
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