Finding Africa's Lost River Valley

14,000 years ago, a seasonal monsoon turned the Sahara Desert into a vast savannah, where both people and animals lived in great numbers. Today we still know very little about the people who once lived here, but a series of recent discoveries might have brought us closer than ever before to uncovering the truth.

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Sources / Further Reading:

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

[kckc]

Yeah he’s right. Fall of Civilizations is THE BEST history channel. It’s not just a podcast, the videos are stunning. 15/10 highly recommend

[patrickw]

Having lived in Mauritania, and having great feelings for the country and the whole Hassaniya-speaking area, I would love to see an undiscovered river valley civilization discovered there and bringing international attention to the area. But you're correct in pointing out that human conflicts will delay major, organized investigations. So here's a chance for brave and crazy and vainglorious individuals to head there and do some digging around. The era of Indiana Jones is not over!

[ugojlachapelle]

About finding cities, Thebes may add another significant clue.

As you have pointed out, it is somewhat located close to the traditional border between the two Lands of Egypt.

However, it is also located near the big bend in the Nile River. This bend has made it possible to get fertile land closer together. This in turn made it possible to get more people closer together, making exchange between them more likely, making cities, in turn, more useful for those very exchanges.

Why would closer land make it more likely for cities? Because of how transportation works. For most of our history, we've been highly limited in the distance we could cover, and this includes crop transport. Having closer lands at hand meant more crops available closely, meaning more food surpluses handy for the hungry specialized workers found in those cities.

So I would add the hypothesis that finding a bend along the river or some other feature that made more fertile land available around a certain location more likely to hold a civilization center.

All of this would also explain why all the first major centers would have avoided coastal areas, or, at least, make them smaller. If you have a city along the coast, you cut yourself from half the land you could have used for agriculture to sea. Even if we account for fishing, it doesn't fully compensate for the loss of land, so we'd expect smaller towns along the coast. (The same applies to towns bordering lakes, the Fayyum never became a large city of Ancient Egypt for probably similar reasons.)

With a city along a river, you still get the water for drinking, agriculture and transport without sacrificing too much arable land to produce the food needed to maintain the city's population. It's even better with a band as seasonally flooded riverbanks are among the most fertile lands available.

Therefore, if I were to look for a location for a population center, I'd look for a place where there's plenty of lowland to be flooded, probably near a bend of that great river, somewhat distant from any significantly large bodies of water.

[PM]

21:59 While the Eye of the Sahara may likely be just a geologic structure and may not have anything there, it is still somewhat interesting that we're talking about potential ancient civilizations in the green Sahara and the Eye just so happens to be relatively close to the old Tamanrasset river bed.

[CMVBrielman]

I’d love a video on what was going on in the Amazon when the Sahara was green. Every discussion of a potentially future green Sahara seems to result in concern that the lack of phosphate kicked up by erosion from Morocco would doom the Amazon.

And for clarity: what I’m interested in is “was the Amazon non-existent when the Sahara was green in the past?”

[PCCyborg]

Something to perhaps consider that wasn't mentioned in the video is that given the time scale we're dealing with the river bed as seen today is likely not the same path of the river ten thousand years ago. Doesn't really change much for discussion purposes but the locations of interest may be off by many kilometres. A combination of LiDAR, Radar, and traditional knowledge from the area (If it still exists) could help to narrow down the huge search area. So many cool possibilities!

[JetR]

It always interests me when people talk about this period, as there is a lot of evidence that Arabia was also very green at the time from Rock Art (search graffiti rock Saudi Arabia). With it's proximity to the fertile crescent I imagine there could well have been agriculture there as well

[tolli]

Oh man you know it's going to be a great day when there's a new Atlas Pro video out! Your channel has easily earned it's place amongst my top five favorite channels all time! Keep up the amazing work that you do!!

[rayorcc]

This kind of 'what once could have been' content is really interesting, because we still have so much to learn from the past. Thank you for creating such great content!

[broadho]

This channel makes me so happy as an environmental history masters student

So many historians don’t think big enough but the way to unlocking the truth of human history is through understanding the environment that shaped it.

[dannileigh]

Fall of Civilisations podcast came out with their bronze age collapse episode right at the beginning of the pandemic and I've been obsessed ever since. Great as both audio and video formats.

[Keenan_G]

The conclusion at the end is the best bit of writing in this video, and maybe in most of yours. IMO. Very thought-provoking connection. Really grounds you in terms of your place in the greater historical narrative.

[thenewkhan]

I was reading some papers about this ancient river a few months ago and was wondering why so little archeological work is done in the region. Thanks for explanation!

[settler]

Actually Ur was a coastal city, but the coast shifted a lot since then. Nevertheless as always - great video. Thanks for keeping up a good work! Thanks to you I want to explore world more and more.

[EIixir]

Episodes like this always make me wonder how much knowledge we've lost of our own history.

[Ingcivilcarlos]

Awesome content as always. I'm proactively blaming you for all the wasted hours I'm about to spend on Google earth looking for undiscovered ancient civilizations lol

[WestOfEarth]

This region of Africa is one of my personal favorites if only because it seems of little interest to others. I'm so thrilled you investigated this area, and would enjoy deep dives into other other potential lost rivers along Africa's West Coast. Fascinating video.

[mokhtarmoussa]

Hello, I am from Mauritania. I really happy to see the on growing attention and fascination the Sahara is gathering around the world.
I hope one day we will uncover some of it great mysteries.

[sneedmando]

I love Fall of Civilizations, amazing quality, educational, and entertaining
You do a great job too Atlas

[philpaine]

I've been fascinated by this issue ever since I spent time in the relevant places in my youth. I've stood on "reg" plains in the middle of the Sahara in which you could see millions of fish skeletons, seen sand oceans of dunes hundreds of metres high alternatively swallowing and revealing ancient settlements. Believe me, the territory is so vast, and the conditions (both natural and political) so dangerous, that the amount of scientific archaeology that has been conducted there is insignificant. We still get astonishing surprises, such as the recent discovery of a huge temple complex in Orkney, in places where archaeologists have been combing the land in huge numbers for two hundred years. If we still get big surprises in places you can just pop over to on a one hour ferry ride from Scotland, the surprises in store for us in the Sahara will probably be mind-blowing. The key will always be co-operation with the Tuareg and the Teda, the only people who actually know the desert well enough to survive in it unaided.