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.
Support me on Patreon here: / atlaspro
For the full map find me on twitter @theatlaspro
Check out the Fall of Civilizations Podcast here: / fallofcivilizationspod...
Sources / Further Reading:
www.researchgate.net/figure/C...
www.researchgate.net/figure/H...
www.researchgate.net/figure/C...
www.cambridge.org/core/books/...
www.theguardian.com/science/2...
www.nature.com/articles/ncomm...
www.khanacademy.org/humanitie...
www.bbc.com/news/world-135229...
www.khanacademy.org/humanitie...
www.researchgate.net/publicat...
www.sahistory.org.za/article/...
genomebiology.biomedcentral.c...
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
www.asu.cas.cz/~jklokocn/AJG_...
archive.ph/20151111221526/htt...
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African...
www.cambridge.org/core/journa...
www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvh1dh5w
www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/...
academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
historyofyesterday.com/the-my...
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
core.ac.uk/download/pdf/52774...
www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvh1dh5w
www.researchgate.net/publicat...
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
"Deliberate Thought" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
"Silver Flame" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
Yo wake up atlas pro just posted
It’s 4 am I habe
I had to make coffee,but. I'm here!!
No
@@gtbkts good idea!
Better way to wake up than foldgers in your cup
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
Fall of Civilizations is one of my favorite things that exists. I fall asleep to the podcasts often but the intro theme still gives me chills. Absolutely recommend 100%
The videos are just stock footage, the podcasts are where there real work is.
@@niagaradrones the videos are great for adding context but yes I agree the writing is the true value
Yes it is. I have listened to all of their episodes!
100/10 you mean. Paul is a terriffic story teller!
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.
You explained rise of Calcutta perfectly.
What do you mean by "get fertile land closer together"? By settling on the inside of the bend? So you get twice the width of farmland?
@@Embassy_of_Jupiter No, by having more farmland in walking distance. Let's use parcels. If you have three parcels of land following a straight river, the two parcels on either side are separated by the parcel inbetween. If the river bends, the two parcels on either sides can get a lot closer, as the bend forces all parcels to get narrower by the river if we give each parcel equal access to the water. On a larger scale, this makes possible diagonal travel, which reduces distances by about a 30% between areas. This 30% decrease in distance makes it possible to have more farmland within walking distance, therefore making more food available to a fixed location like a city.
Rivers meander and move. I would bet the city is no longer on the river but far away or even under denile
Ur was in the coast though
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!
Unfortunately armed conflicts around historical sites more often than not lead to unrestricted pillaging of artifacts to sell on the black market to fund the conflict with more weapons and supplies. I would rather see an end to the conflict and then in some 10-20 years, when things have settled down, a new discovery.
@@Tokru86 That's a very fair and sober point!
Bro litteraly lives on the grounds of ancient atlantis and has no idea 💀
@@ElderGod4 *sign atlantis was certainly not described as that old, they interpreted the method of dating platon used wrong, as this story came to popularity, atlantis was not around 6000 but 3500 years ago. Certainly younger as the time of a green or even flooded sahara. & "Before the gates of hercules" is not vage enough to locate is that far south lol This is far of from anything that was ever called this way.
Maybe you could answer something for me, there are symbols in the dessert of Tassili N'Ajjer that is an oval with a circle on the western side within the oval and two parallel lines running from the circle to the eastern side of the oval. Sometimes there are other satellite circles within but parralel lines almost always run WSW. Been cataloging them for few years closest answer I've found was an ancient well on Sardinia was similar and it was a 6Thank You
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?”
What about Chinese deserts?! Would love a video about that too
the amazon is pretty close to doomed anyways
The Amazon rainforest has been around for 50 million years, and the phosphorus it receives, is mostly from a depression in Chad, not from the coasts of Morocco. Although there is no doubt that a greener Sahara resulted in less dust being blown across the Atlantic, and the recession of the Amazon rainforest, it wasn't a uniform recession, focused mostly on the edges where grasslands and Savannah-like ecosystems spread in place of trees, the core of the jungle was mostly untouched as it has developed its own rainy climate across millions of years that kept the rainforest in a "good shape".
Tbf tho amazon was the last remnant of an ancient forest that covers all of americas all the way to greenland
On a somewhat related note, there's an amazing paper which gives an estimated map of global vegetation during the Last Ice Age. According to its findings, the Amazon Rainforest did exist, but was **much** smaller than it is today, and was split into two forests separated by a vast savanna. Though it should be noted that the Sahara was not green during that time-it was just as dry as it is today, and actually a bit larger. Ray & Adams, 2001, "A GIS-based Vegetation Map of the World at the Last Glacial Maximum (25,000-15,000 BP)
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.
There are some ruins in the Eye of the Sahara or Richat and you can see them on google maps, how old they are is unknown that I know of.
Jimmy's youtube channel has a new Atlantis video coming within weeks.
Well, The Eye of Sahara is probably the most plausible location of an actual Atlantis of the past. If that were to be true, it would have most likely gotten it's water from a different source than the Tamanrasset river, but the fact that the monsoon would have gotten more moisture in the Western part of Sahara makes this theory even more plausible.
It could possibly have been a religious site. A pilgrimage site for this civilization that was significant enough to be traveled too, despite being in a poor location in terms of a population center.
Richat structure was maybe not a best place to grow crops, but the people living back then might have thought that it was made by gods or by lost human civilization, so they might have build their capital there. Yet they still called themselves atlantians, because of the connection to the sea by rivers and trade.
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!
Traditional knowledge would be difficult. The only people who might know of anything in that region would be Western Sahara traders who crossed the deserts from Northern Africa to Western Africa. Those trade routes were largely destroyed by the scramble for Africa as big steam boats meant you could carry large amounts of cargo by going around fairly easily, and political divisions meant that travel became harder as it was regulated and European colonialists sought to assert their control over their new dominions. Add on new political instability since decolonization, the relatively small number of traders compared to farmers and any ancient trader knowledge is almost certainly lost, at best leaving only a few stories passed down in a few families, who are unlikely to get in contact with the right people to find clues in these stories.
Why?
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
This is true! Unfortunately I wasn't able to depict Arabia properly in this one, I just could find any reliable depictions of it. Maybe I'll have to make a video about it in the future 🤔
@@AtlasPro1 There is unsurprisingly very little information on it. I only really know as I spent a lot of my childhood there and my Dad did a lot of desert expeditions. When you see a rock in the middle of the desert with pictures of Savanah animals its very telling. We also visited Neolithic camps in the Empty Quarter where there were loads arrow heads and associated items. These were literally days from the nearest road and about as remote as you can get without being at sea or in the Arctic or Antarctic but were obviously hives of activity in the Neolithic
the water level was lower back then so most of the persian gulf would have been a basin for both the Euphrates and tigris, as well as for any other paleolake in arabia. This is known in many historical areas, as some even suggest the famous biblical eden was located within the gulf and would originate many of the local flood myths on the area.
@@AtlasPro1 I'd definitely watch that video :) a general desertification video would be a great addition too, perhaps showing predictions of how the deserts we know will change and if any new ones may form due to climate change
@@AtlasPro1 What about india's lost river?? that might be very interesting video
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.
Fascinating indeed. "I don't make things complicated, things get complicated all by themselves." (vintage Mell Gibson)
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!
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
I think you mean you're proactively thanking me to leading you to the discovery of a lifetime!
If that topic interests you try reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Truly an eye opening book
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.
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!!
Episodes like this always make me wonder how much knowledge we've lost of our own history.
99.99999999999999999999999% I think
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.
Akshually
🤓
idiot@@grayscale888
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!
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.
Fall of Civilizations is by far the best podcast/documentary/history series. It's a whole other level compared to all other content on those topics. They're better made than multi million productions, it's insanely good.
Is it really just one guy on his bedroom?
@@joshuataylor3550 It's Paul M. M. Cooper and he has a PhD. Don't know if he records the podcast or does the video editing in his bedroom or not, but it's not really relevant.
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.
22:49 Coming from China I think the story of Lop Nur (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lop_Nur ) worth exploring. Its evolution from what used to be the largest lake in China to the least habitable desert always fascinate me. It also tells the tale of how the disappearance of water dooming a thriving Silk Road city-state.
Now THIS is interesting. Thanks for the tip!
Yes. I'd love to know more about this.
Reather more like the Dead Sea than a forgotten lake, but would make for a good "Fall of Civilizations" podcast topic.
I had never thought about the timing of the green Sahara overlapping with civilizations like Egypt and Mesopotamia! This would be such a cool discovery if anything were to come of this!
Huh, never thought a large river Delta could have ever existed in Mauritania.
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.
Please do more videos about the Holocene. This one was really good and it is a very good period to examine how geography is such a large factor in human history
I love Fall of Civilizations, amazing quality, educational, and entertaining You do a great job too Atlas
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.
Amazing how you manage to be more informat, curious and deep-insighted than any of TV shows today. Keep it up! You are great!
Great work Atlas Pro, instead of just giving us information you raise questions. I wish more edutainment channels will do so. Keep it up!
Fall of civilization is the best take on history podcast there is.
Would love to see you do a more detailed analysis of the geological feature that is the Richat structure. Great video as always, cheers!
You mean Atlantis?
PS, I love your use of old documentary footage on your various videos.
I absolutely love Fall of Civilizations podcast, the videos they put together add great visuals and context to an already amazingly presented history. Ive never been dissapointed by a single video and frequently rewatch them. As for where you should look next, I cant remember if you have or not but an indepth video about Doggerland would be cool
I'd love to see your exploration of the Eye of the Srahara. I doubt the claims it was Atlantis, but it is a really neat area and my layman brain doesn't know much about it or really how to research it
kzhead.info/sun/qcpul89rkaloY3A/bejne.html Video explaining the geology that created the Eye of the Sahara.
To be fair, one should doubt any claims of having found Atlantis, as Atlantis is pretty clearly fictional, and its inspirations are relatively easy to guess.
@@aquila4460 This is why we can't make progress in the archaeological world if we keep burying our heads in the ground.
@@rogueascendant6611 Should we search for Númenor next, while we are at it? Archeology is about evaluating the probability of where ancient ruins might be and following the leads that are actually useful. We can't just go hunting after every single myth in the world. So let us evaluate how likely Atlantis is to be a real city, let's start with the basic information. Plato claims Atlantis lay directly past the Pillars of Heracles(Straight of Gibraltar) and the mudflats its sinking caused made passage by ship between the Mediterranean and Atlantic impossible. Those are strike one and two for Atlantis being a real city. The location is very clear, and very clearly wrong. Plato furthermore claims Atlantis was the dominant empire of its time, 9000 years before platos time, conquering or subjugating the entire Mediterraine before being defeated by Athens. This Athens, is said by Plato, to have a government that worked exactly like the type of government plato personally idealized, which allowed them to fend of the Super-Empire. Strike 3: The timeframe would squarely place Platos Athen and Atlantis squarely far earlier then most civilisations, with a level of technology far more applicable to Platos time. Strike 4: There is absolutely no hint in any other civilisation of such a Mediterraine Spanning Empire existing, we have found no artifacts of their existence, where we would expect, coinage, weapons, even markers of victories, considering they just subjugated a good part of the known world. Strike 5: The story has a very clear moral, that is perfectly in line with Platos political and spiritual believes. Strike 6: Plato is the earliest mention of Atlantis, and every single other source references him directly or indirectly. (This by itself would not be a good argument, however, considering all the other arguments against Atlantis... it is kinda a final nail in the coffin). Furthermore, there is a civilisation that, under the assumption that Atlantis is a fictional story, is a pretty clear inspiration. Minoa. Expansionist Empire in Conflict with the greek citystates? Massive check. Brought to fall by a natural disaster during one of their strongest times? Check. Plato drew inspirations from the stories of the relatively recent past, to make a political and moral point. There is a reason why most, if not all, credible researches consider Atlantis a myth of fictional entirely.
@@aquila4460 "Should we search for Númenor next, while we are at it?" Har de har har.
I think probably the best way we have at the moment to detect any traces of civilisation would be using similar ground penetrating radar techniques that originally found the river, especially if they used rock as a building material, It'll be a lot more difficult to detect anything if they built everything in wood though.
Hey Atlas Pro, just want to say I appreciate your videos and look forward to it everytime I stumble upon it on my feed. ❤️ Thanks.
Ayy props for the Fall of Civilizations podcast. I cannot overstate my appreciation for their content. Great video too :)
I was wondering if you would mention the eye of the Sahara and the atlas mountains. That is directly in that region and I really would be fascinated if archeological studies find things relating to ancient human being activity in the region when it was a habitable climate/ecosystem/and that immense river system. I love satellite archeology. Great episode man 👍🏻
Funnily enough there is a really interesting agricultural Saharan civilization that we already know about - although they thrived long after the Green Sahara had faded - the Garamantes. Like the Nabateans they maintained sophisticated systems of water management and built themselves a kingdom on the routes through the Sahara. Unfortunately we don't know a whole lot about them. There were high hopes following Gaddaffi's downfall that the area would see a new wave of archaeological investigations, but the onset of the civil war has squashed those optimistic hopes for the foreseeable future... Great video! I had never heard about this river before.
They had a very migratory culture though, settling in oasis towns mostly.. not exactly as sophisticated as what is possibly from the green sahara period.
Really fun video! Thanks for the podcast rec
Been fantasizing about this for awhile! Same could be said for the Amazon rainforest. Thanks so much for making this great video!
I came to your channel ages ago because of your videos discussing the origin of specific food plants (I was doing book research at the time), and I stayed because of the quality of your presentations and your scripts. I'm really grateful for the wonderful content you keep putting out, and I'm so glad to see you growing and thriving and getting even better with every video! This was well thought out, clearly explained, and the pace was just right. Once again an excellent piece of work - and once again, thank you!
It's always the same for any kind of field research or exploration: logistics and politics. Great and very cool topic to wonder about! And I have to include myself as well with those in the comments that love the podcast, it's absolutely fantastic!
Super interesting and well researched video. Love your work!
Incredible content!😯Awesome script and editing as well! Thank you!
Great! looking forward to watching this. Question, did you split that rock from the last video?
You did an amazing job simplifying what happened over few thousand years.
I'd sort of stopped watching videos of yours, not a lack of interest but rather just idk focusing on other topics. I came back and I'm glad I did c: Great quality, as always. Love how much interest you convey in the topics you make these videos about, and the fact that you can tell there's research and that you're personally invested in the topics. It's lovely to watch videos like this one
Well done sir! Thank you! I also love all Fall Of Civilization Podcasts!
Always love a new video.
I hadn't realized that the monsoons associated with the "Green Sahara" originated in the Atlantic (for some reason - maybe because I've only ever heard or thought of the situation in and around Egypt - I'd always assumed it was Mediterranean water vapour that was sucked in over the Sahara by the much warmer temperatures and resulting convection cells over the land). But it does stand to reason that the same phenomenon might also suck even more water vapour into the Western Sahara from the Atlantic. Which raises an interesting question: since the "Green Sahara" was associated with warmer temperatures than today, do any of the climatic models of climate change anticipate a rebooting of "Green Sahara" monsoons at some point? (I don't mean to imply that any such impacts might help mitigate the worse impacts of climate change over the coming century or two - particularly if it's something that could take centuries more or millennia to develop - but it's an interesting property of dynamic systems like the global climate that things don't necessarily move in predictable straight lines and that a hotter world might mean both bigger droughts and desertification in some areas and a contrary trend in others...)
This is so interesting! Would love another video on the topic.
This video is kicking up a lot of excitement of what could possibly be found still ! Green Sahara is one of my favourite topic's.
Another outstanding and interesting video thank you. I would love to hear your take on Randal Carlson theory that during the last ice age the immense weight of both the European and North America Ice Sheets cause the Azores plateau to rise above the sea and expose a land mass for a period of time. He sights some compelling finds made decades ago that found sand and rock that could only have be formed above land that dated back to as little as 10,000 to 12,000 plus years ago. If this is true this would perfectly fit the described location of the fabled Atlantis and give credit to the possibility the culture behind the legend once could have existed.
You should look at what was written on atlantis originally, not what mystcist made out of it. Should be humbling
Great video as always! This subject in particular intrigues me ever so much as I’ve studied physical geography for the last few years on the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. In fact, I’ve studied historical meander bends of the Rhine river. I think that it could very well be possible for ancient civilisations to be found along this historical river, perhaps with the use of Digital Elevation Models (DEM’s). Although there is probably not much of this data available, especially when keeping the poor political state in mind. This type of research often result in remarkable findings, even with the littlest of elevation data (e.g. LiDAR data). Interesting topic to think about
It's always good to see my favourite content creators enjoy each others content :) Fall of civilisation podcast is one of my go to bedtime listens
That was amazing! And such good writing... It really is exciting to think about :)
Have you ever heard of the Garamantes? They lived in the Lybian sahara, mined water to drink and farm for 1000 years, built some fortresses and stuff... I think it is entirely possible for another civilization to have existed in the middle of the sahara for sometime after the arae desertified. The only problem is that the Garamantes where discovered quite recently and their fortresses can actually be seen by normal satellites, so searching in the middle of the desert would be quite the challenge. My guess is that we will discover something interesting there while searching for oil or ores.
Those were so cool. Romans could stop the Chadramantes
Those qanats are dope
always love a new video
I absolutely love every single video you upload. They are a treat every time. Congrats on the million mark! Soon 2M
Phenomenal work. Your best video yet
Sounds like it could be a good explanation for Atlantis: 1. right area according to ancient history 2. possible navigable waterways leading to a boat-traveling civilization 3. "richat structure" that may have once been filled with some water and matching fabled descriptions of a ringed settlement 4. a possibly settled delta that sank into the sea (possibly involving a disastrous storm-surge or tsunami) 5. a civilization that was buried in a "sea" of sand as the climate changed
Hmm, perhaps Atlantis was an island in the middle of one of those large lakes which were essentially inland seas (like Tenochtitlan) and the river delta was the shoal of mud mentioned that made it impassable? “But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.”
Isn't Atlantis a space ship?
Thank you for explaining the polisario situation so well! I'm from Morocco!
The explanation was superficial though. Just the usual it was called spanish sahara then... but the video was about geology so we can give the guy some slack
I cannot get enough of Fall of Civilizations. It is seriously amazing.
Love the add. Fall of civilization channel is AMAZING
I feel like some lost civilizations you can cover would be those in the Amazon rainforests. The forest was heavily populated up to 10 million, and had a very different way of life compared to the well known ones. The most comparable civilizations to the Amazonian one’s would be Papuan in my opinion. The channel ancient americas does cover it really well, so I’m not certain what could be added, if anything you could give them a shout out or collab.
Giving the rich (human) history of the African continent, I wonder to which degree ancient politics affected any settlement placement in this region. Modern day borders are there to a great extent "thanks to" the Europeans, who knows what territorial claims shaped the history multiple millennia in the past. Fascinating stuff, thanks for sharing!
Fall of civilizations is an amazing podcast and deserves much more attention for it's superb quality
Loved this video. Always a treat when you show up in my subscriptions.
If you had to choose one spot to begin I'd go nearest to the eye of the sahara. I'd was formed millions of years ago by volcanic activity and as we all know here volcanic soil is insanely fertile.
If you are looking for settlement locations maybe 'the fall line', the farthest place up a river a boat can navigate naturally, might be a good idea.
This is great! Love your videos♥
Thank you so much for this enthralling video! I literally want to go to these spots and start digging now.
Vox just published a very interesting video on how the Amazon rainforest actually supported entire civilizations of indigenous populations despite scientists claiming it to be inhospitable. If anyone is a fan of these “lost civilizations” type of videos I highly recommend you check it out! Anyway, I like your content and would love to see you cover the Amazon next:)
Glad you did a vid on this, have a question. If dust storms in the Sahara act as fertilizer for the Amazon basin, what happened when there were no dust storms because the Sahara was grass and lakes?
En esos períodos no hubo depósitos de ese polvo en los sedimentos y hoy día se conocen y estudian al detalle, se sabe perfectamente cuando hubo periodos húmedos y cálidos en ese desierto desde hace más de dos millones de años, así que los testigos de esos sucesos hoy día se conocen,
Holly hell, happy 1 million dude, great job!
Hell yeah, I love the Fall of Civilizations podcast! They are really on another level when it comes to historical content.
I would be skeptical of finding any proper cities or large monuments along there given the timing of arrival of agriculture and the end of the African Humid Period. The gap between the development of agriculture and the development of cities and monuments in the Near East was thousands of years. Although there were some monumental works, such as the Tower of Jericho and the megaliths of Gobeklitepe and nearby sites, these were not as common as later periods. For a few thousand years, people lived in smaller villages that appear to have been rather egalitarian, with house all being a similar size. So rather than searching for lost cities and grand monuments, I would say that the search should be for smaller towns and villages like we see in the Neolithic Near East.
Agreed; they're not going to find anything beyond homesteads and maybe some villages. But those would be really important finds, because we suspect, based on the age and spread of the Afro-Asiatic language family, that something interesting happened during this period with human biogeography. Even a single bit of aDNA from this period would be extraordinarily interesting.
Sometimes relying on Native myths might help, do the Sawhari or Berbers have any myths about some old civilization or people in that area
I’ve been listening to that podcast for a while. It’s honestly amazing
suprised you didn't mention the richat structure, there are theories that it was altantis. It was connected to the basin you mentioned and is attached to a riverbed, it also sits behind two mountains which would have offered protection, and people still live near there, to this day.
I was watching your video on rainforests, and went on a rabbit hole looking for a proper definition of rainforests, I settled on a definition used by the Indian government for wet evergreen forests which went something like an evergreen or semi evergreen forest which gets more than 1500 mm of precipitation along with a dry wet season of no more than four months, also can you think of any reason why evergreen rainforests are restricted to higher altitudes while the lower reaches are dominated by moist deciduous forests in the Southern Western Ghats mountain range in india while areas with similar precipitation and temperature patterns like northern Vietnam, Northeast India and Mindoro have Lowland rainforests, I'm unable to come up with a convincing reason.
Not sure if I understand you correctly, but two things come to mind for me: 1. Latitude: Depending on your distance from the equator (towards the poles) the general wind directions change, and thus the direction evaporated water from the seas gets transported to. 2. Altitude: Rain begins to form when the air is no longer capable of holding all the water it contains as moisture. This is primarily dependant on the temperature of the air (and the pressure). Usually the temperature tends to drop if the air is pushed up a mointainside and thus the mountainsides standing against the winds blowing from a neaby body of water tend to be the regions with most consisten rainfall. So maybe this helps to explain why you find what kind of forest in what region, depending on the geography that influences local climate and weather :D
In my opinion there's nothing more beautiful than Africa without the Sahara, but it being a rainforest/jungle/plains instead, Imagine the amount of unknown species there, and how all of history would've changed if the Sahara didn't exist, it's just fascinating
i love your videos man. you're probably my favorite KZheadr in this space. keep the hits comin' my brutha. =P
Happy to see people talking about Fall of Civilizations. Love that podcast.
Everything you described points to the Eyes of Sahara, and I thought you were going to say that it is the perfect place for a city. This is exactly what Jimmy at Bright Insight has been trying to point out. The Atalantis.
indiana jones would go into the western sahara and risk his life because it belongs in a museum
I appreciate that you expand my interest for geography from a narrow scope of the geography of mankind's time to a broad scope of distant past as well
The observation you made about the delta was brilliant, that can be applied when searching for other lost rivers.
I mean some conspiracy theorists would have you believe that the Lost City of Atlantis existed in the Green Sahara, just look at the Richat Structure in Mauritania.
My ancestors, the Serer, were probably there thousands of years ago before being chased down south by fulas, almoravids and arabs coming north with desertification. But there is only evidence that they were north of the Senegal river over 2000 years ago and chased down later, and participated in the Ghana empire. I also think this area was inhabited by Amazighs/Berber people, and the Fulani/Peul people, as we know they were in north west of sahara of tens of thousands of years, including algeria and morocco. Why I think my serer ancestors werent the main inhabitants or even the first of the area is because they are genetically closer to all the other subsaharian west africans, who live in very humid coastal lowlands and have malaria+duffy and other adaptation of more equatorial conditions. However Fulanis and Amazighs both can not only live in drier conditions, but they can also digest milk and starchy foods (amylase and such) much better than all the local tribes, which is a sign of all agricultural peoples of the main ancient civilizations in the great river valleys. My serer ancestors came from the south and arrived in the area some time later. And for anyone trying to say its not true please check the evidence, including genetic before saying things
Interesting
Love the videos. Fall of civilisations is also a favorite of mine. I highly recommend you both to people.
love The Fall of Civilizations podcast I think I have listened to almost every single one and I always look forward to new ones. Hell they put me to sleep every night listening to older episodes on my playlist
U came close to eye of Africa, atlantis
Never thought this would spiral into a discussion about the Western Sahara. I came here really just to learn about the time the Sahara desert was green.
OMG!!! I love the shout out to Fall of Civilizations, love that channel, especially episode 13 with the Assyrians
i swear to god the way this guy makes his videos is golden keep it up man love your videos
Imagine if we find a civilization there and then find out that it was actually the first civilization ever.
We know how the knowledge of agriculture flowed. If anything is there, it would be after Egypt.
14k ya sea levels were 120m average lower, so, surely the river delta is now submerged and many 10s of km out to the west so all signs of a delta and any habitation from the older and younger Dryas period is now under 100m of ocean. What is mind boggling is this is cyclical and has happened about10 times since the remains of the H. Sapiens family found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco and dated 320k ya.
aaaaa it's a fall of civ reference! the very best thing on youtube. glad to see it here.
As always awesome quality content, Thanks :)