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5000 years ago Sahara was a green landscape with lakes and rivers

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Re: 5000 years ago Sahara was a green landscape with lakes and rivers

#21

Even just 500 years ago most of the Sahara was green.

Hate to be the "Source?" person, but were you there at the time?

If not, please update Wikipedia with references to your original source of information.

(Wikipedia doesn't admit original research.)

Re: 5000 years ago Sahara was a green landscape with lakes and rivers

#22

Is this suggesting that modern civilization started with climate change? At the end, he points out that the occupants of these areas moved towards the coasts during the desertification. This would have been immediately preceding the establishment of the first Egyptian dynasty.

It's worth remembering that civilization was independently invented in several different places, at least in Mesoamerica, Peru, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus River, and China. Possibly more, as anthropology has tended to assume that cultural innovation is imported (or at least adapted) from elsewhere in the absence of evidence one way or the other. Climate change is presently believed to be a major catalyst to the develo…

All civilization started soon after the end of the last ice age, which was the last big climate change.

Re: 5000 years ago Sahara was a green landscape with lakes and rivers

#24

This video puts a lot of it together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0_Of0WGkEs He starts with science and reaches into speculation, but, there's real, interesting science in it.

I see it as a little of science mixed with a lot of speculation, and good amount of crackpotoplogy.

The part where he tries to show that the old map of Herodotus (c. 484BC – c. 425BC) is somewhat similar to the map of rivers and basins, but they don't even look similar. (Also note that the dates discussed in this articles are about 5000 years ago, something like 2500 years before Herodotus.)

About the erosion in the Sphinx: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_water_erosion_hypothesi...

And I prefer to ignore the last part about the Atlantis ...

Re: 5000 years ago Sahara was a green landscape with lakes and rivers

#25
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth remembering that civilization was independently invented in several different places, at least in Mesoamerica, Peru, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus River, and China. Possibly more, as anthropology has tended to assume that cultural innovation is imported (or at least adapted) from elsewhere in the absence of evidence one way or the other. Climate change is presently believed to be a major catalyst to the develo…

All civilization started soon after the end of the last ice age, which was the last big climate change.

Your comment does prompt the reply that there is a wide variance in the definition of key words on the subject, particularly as applies to popular interpretation.

In the anthropological context, "civilization" is usually meant to refer to the most complex form of societal organization. Civilizations don't start appearing until about 6000-7000 years ago. By contrast, the Younger Dryas (a sudden climatic shift in the Northern hemisphere that reverted temperatures back to the last glacial maximum) occurred about 12000 years ago. The Laurentide ice sheet probably completely collapsed by about 11000 years ago.

With these definitions, you can see that the distance from the end of the last ice age (collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet) or the end of the last big climate change (Younger Dryas) to the beginning of civilization (~Uruk period in Mesopotamia) is around the same magnitude as the distance from the beginning of civilization to the present day. That's not exactly "soon."

Re: 5000 years ago Sahara was a green landscape with lakes and rivers

#27

Twitter is such a terrible way of displaying long form content like this.

It's a good teaser for the podcast, I thought. The last episode (ep 7, which covers this topic) is more than 2 hours long. It's pretty great.

The title of the podcast, and the experience of googling some of the names in the diagram and getting sites that don't scream credibility, makes me wonder:

Does anyone know the validity of this? Can any archaeologist/historian types recommend sources?

Re: 5000 years ago Sahara was a green landscape with lakes and rivers

#28
post #17

> https://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/7go26a/the_hour_will... > It was narrated from Abu Hurayrah (may Allaah be pleased with him) that the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “The Hour will not begin until the land of the Arabs once again becomes meadows and rivers.” When I was a teenager, I was interested in what people used to say about the future in the past and this was the…

That would not have been about the Sahara, but about Arabia.

If you look at some Sat photos of Saudi Arabia you will see some crazy large circular meadows. They have greened the desert. Almarai is one of the world's largest dairy farms.

Re: 5000 years ago Sahara was a green landscape with lakes and rivers

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to link and pass around the most interesting sentence (and associated media) as a unit separate from the rest (but keeping the original context attached) makes it much easier for things to spread. How often have you wanted to share an interesting paragraph from an article and been unable to link to it? Twitter threads are an awkward solution to this, but they're the best available.

They are far from the best available. The best option is to send the link and then send the text of the paragraph you wanted to highlight.

You could do this on Twitter if you stay within the character limit but for material in the link, that requires 5+ tweets to cover completely, it simply seems that the amount of scrolling and clicking is a waste. This sort of stuff is not always so neatly presented as it is on this particular link within Twitter. On your timeline, you might notice the "part 3" tweet first. Then you gotta click it to try to gain a larger context to see if its actually interesting. Then, if it is, you have to click to find the "part 1" tweet. Sometimes this will be simple because you can show the entire thread. Other times it seems like you cant. It is a lot of manual overhead to consume two paragraphs or so plus a link to the actual podcast that the paragraphs are describing.
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