
5000 years ago Sahara was a green landscape with lakes and rivers - jkirsteins
https://twitter.com/fall_of_civ_pod/status/1168101940758306817
======
cheez
>
> [https://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/7go26a/the_hour_will...](https://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/7go26a/the_hour_will_not_begin_until_the_land_of_the/)

> 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 one thing that ever stuck out to me in my
readings.

I guess it was common knowledge among the knowledgeable at the time that this
was true but I was never able to corroborate it.

~~~
steve19
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.

~~~
crooked-v
More broadly, the Middle East in general was once extraordinarily bountiful,
but the cumulative effects of natural climate change and thousands and
thousands of years of saltwater irrigation have unfortunately desertified much
of the region.

~~~
parasense
Well yeah, and also considering that natural climate change was the most
significant issue. Since the Pleistocene ice age ended around 11 thousand
years ago, and ever since then the equatorial regions have changed
dramatically. Coincidentally this is about the beginning of recorded history,
or at least the parts recovered from antiquity. The regions around north
Africa, the Arabian peninsula, etc... they all would have been ideal habitats
for hominids given the climate of the Earth back then, most of the habitable
zones were near the equator during the last ice age, and began expanding
north/south as the Ice melted. Likewise the grasslands of north Africa, and
Arabian peninsula began to slowly change into arid deserts while the other
places thawed.

It's a pity the cradle of civilization turned to sand, but at the cost of
Earth becoming more habitable it's a fair trade.

~~~
singularity2001
Would the Sahara have turned into a desert without millennia of overgrazing
and over-burning?

------
adolph
_Changes in the earth 's orbit known as its orbital precession, a change in
tilt that cycles every 25,000 years, forced the African monsoon rains
southward, and the Sahara became drier._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Um. Cut down all the trees and a forest has a hard time recovering. The Sahara
is likely man-made. Like almost all deserts on Earth except Namibia and
Australian which are millions of years old, the rest are mere thousands.

Familiar story. America's Southwest used to be treed grasslands until
overgrazing turned them to sand and wasteland.

~~~
aliswe
It's not just a lack of trees. It's a lack of soil as well. And the
temperatures are really unforgiving. Heard about al rub al khali, ie most of
saudi arabia? Who cut down those trees you think?

I'm not saying overgrazing never happened, bit it was not nearly enough to
explain the current desolation.

~~~
aliswe
Also, on the otger hand, check out the al bayda project in saudi arabia, the
site of which was a forest just 100 years ago (according to the villagers)

------
ivanhoe
And just 2 millenniums ago, around 140 B.C., when Romans conquered Carthage
(now Tunisia), it was a fertile land and its wheat fields produced enough food
to feed the Rome.

~~~
Iv
And this is what the Thermopylae pass (The battle in 300) looks like today:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopylae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopylae)

------
mcthrowaway123z
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.

~~~
jcranmer
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 development
of civilization in Egypt and Mesopotamia. It also thought to have led to the
collapse of the Indus River Valley civilization. But it is not thought to have
played major roles in the other developments of civilization.

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

~~~
jcranmer
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."

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

~~~
FillardMillmore
You beat me to it. I find this subject interesting but the platform of Twitter
is incredibly ill-fitting for this. I've noticed recently more and more people
doing long-form content on Twitter - I hope it's not a trend that catches on.

~~~
moultano
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.

~~~
baroffoos
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.

~~~
FillardMillmore
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.

~~~
baroffoos
Twitter is obviously a broken system for trying to share interesting links
then. I don't see why we should ruin publishing for everyone else because
twitter doesn't allow sharing text properly.

------
hackerbabz
Do we know the size and health of the Amazon at this time?

I’ve read that the Amazon relies on silt carried from the Sahara.

~~~
war1025
Did you mean the Nile? I can't think of any method that would get silt from
the Sahara in Africa to the Amazon in South America.

~~~
Smoosh
I think it is Sahara to the Amazon: [https://www.wired.com/2015/02/sahara-
keeps-amazon-green/](https://www.wired.com/2015/02/sahara-keeps-amazon-green/)

~~~
war1025
Dang! That's really wild.

------
blake_himself
This video puts a lot of it together:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0_Of0WGkEs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0_Of0WGkEs)

He starts with science and reaches into speculation, but, there's real,
interesting science in it.

~~~
gus_massa
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_water_erosion_hypothesis)

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

------
Causality1
What a striking map that is. It makes me curious how big the Sahara will get,
and how long it will be until it begins shrinking again.

------
perlpimp
curiously looks like it could be in the trough of a milankovich cycle.

------
throwaway122378
Those people should have really used electric cars back then

------
rogerthis
Goat?

~~~
Arubis
You’re being downvoted, but there’s actually something to this theory. The
spread of Islam throughout the African continent brought with it a cultural
taboo against pork; pigs were mostly displaced by goats, which will frankly
eat anything down to its roots.

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

~~~
dmit
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.)

~~~
arcadeparade
it was a conspiratorial youtube video but the narrator sounded like a real
straight shooter.

