In Northeastern Niger, now deep in the desert, there is a life-size rock carving of two giraffes, the largest piece of rock art in the world. Dating from Neolithic times, they and many other carvings strongly suggest that the Sahara region at the time was not a desert at all, but more like the Serengeti. There are many other carvings throughout the Sahara of bovids, including a genus called Pelorovis. Later rock art includes drawings of horses and chariots. All of this indicates that quite recently, perhaps into historical times, the Sahara was not a desert. This is the Sahara Pump Hypothesis, and is considered important to a number of aspects of human history.
The vast desert that now exists all across North Afrika would seem to present a considerable barrier to the exit of humans from the continent. Controversially, we may have evolved on an island in the Gulf of Aden, spread into the Horn of Afrika southward. The earliest known representatives of the genus Homo known date from Ethiopia 2.8 million years ago. Homo habilis is found in East and South Afrika from about 2.3 million years ago although they may not be directly ancestral to us. Homo erectus, on the other hand, is found not only in Afrika but also all the way across Eurasia, including “Java Man”, found in 1891, and “Peking Man”, in 1926. These people must have managed to get out of Afrika somehow. It’s been suggested that they did it by moving along the Nile Valley, but if the whole of North Afrika fluctuated between desert and more humid conditions, their movement is not so unusual. After all, if there used to be giraffes and other typical savannah fauna in the Sahara, why should that not include humans? Moreover, considering that there used to be hippos in the Thames, isn’t it likely that they would’ve got there because there wasn’t a desert in the way?
I feel quite strongly that White people tend to use the Sahara Desert as a way of marking off the more southerly portion of the continent as a kind of “Darkest Africa” (with a C of course) where all the Black people come from. Perhaps we like to imagine there’s always been a line in the sand, as it were, between us and the majority of human genetic diversity found south of it, a view which the Tuareg, for example, do not consider significant. I can’t speak for the Tuareg of course, but those who live in Mali compared to those who live in Libya are considerably darker-skinned but all of them consider themselves as part of the same ethnicity, because they are. However, this is not the main focus of my post today.
The Sahara Pump Hypothesis is generally known as the Sahara Pump Theory, and whereas it certainly rings true to me it is apparently not currently considered rigorous enough to be regarded as one. This raises the Kuhnian view of scientific change in my mind. Thomas Kuhn claimed that the social dynamics of academia were the most significant factor in the acceptance and rejection of theories, so that it was only when the younger people who came up with new theories reached positions of influence that their theories became accepted by the discipline concerned. There may also be other factors. I, for example, believe hominins had an amphibious phase, living in or near beaches, hence my belief that we may have evolved in the Gulf of Aden, which is Elaine Morgan’s belief, not widely accepted by palæontologists, possibly because its emphasis includes the evolution of women rather than focussing solely on men. Hence “Sahara Pump Hypothesis“, even though to an outsider it looks pretty convincing.
There are said to have been a number of phases. The earliest was in the Plio-Pleistocene, a concept used in palæoanthropology to demarcate a period between about five million to twelve thousand years ago which focusses on the evolution and ecology of large vertebrates and the cooling trend which marks this stretch of time, even though it doesn’t work well for more broadly-based palæontology. As far as hominins are concerned, however, there is no firm shift in our history with the onset of the Pleistocene more significant than other events in our story. There are two phases considered here. The first is around 3.2 million years ago, and the other a two hundred millennium period starting about half a million years later. Both of these are well before the start of the current cycle of ice ages and interglacials. One event that happened at this time was that goats spread from Afrika into Eurasia. Another primate than humans, the macaques, also increased their range around then. Geladas, on the other hand, found their range reduced.
Later on there were two waves of Homo erectus migration. The first got all the way to the Far East but the second only reached as far as South Asia. This can be determined by the kind of tools used at the time. There are also signs in the caves, where the likes of stalagmites and stalactites grew during certain periods and halted at others, because water wasn’t entering the systems. Later on, Homo heidelbergensis also managed to spread out of Afrika, and finally Homo sapiens, followed by three more events, one associated with the 8.2 kiloyear event which I’m planning to cover in more detail below, another with the 5.9 kiloyear event and the most recent with the Late Bronze Age Collapse and ensuing Dark Age.
Ice ages generally increase the sizes of hot deserts because a lot of water is locked up in the ice. Consequently, in general during the last few ice ages the Sahara has been both a desert and larger than it is now. The immediate cause of the shrinkage of the desert is increase in the strength of the monsoons in West Afrika, which leads to more water arriving from both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic off the western coast of the Sahara. This is driven by the gradual shifts in the orientation of this planet’s orbit such that we end up closest to the Sun in different seasons. Currently, the Northern summer is when we’re furthest from the Sun, but that very gradually shifts and when the perihelion is in the summer, this triggers more evaporation from the North Atlantic and higher rainfall. Another factor is that the doldrums, the belts of latitude where there is little wind, shift away from the Equator due to warmer temperate regions and this pushes the monsoon region north in the Northern Hemisphere. There are many other factors.
The sea bed off the West Afrikan coast is currently rich in dust from the Sahara and also preserves pollen. Samples at various depths below that sea bed show fluctuations in the levels of dust and pollen types. When there is less dust, there’s also less Ephedra pollen, which prefers drier conditions and more sedge and grass pollen, which need more rain, and this reverses when there’s more. There have in fact been two hundred and thirty periods over the past eight million years when the Sahara was more humid, although when you get to that time scale continental drift becomes significant and Afrika as a whole was in a different position. When there’s more vegetation in the Sahara, it holds on to more water and also reduces the amount of sunlight reflected compared to sand or bare rock, so there’s a feedback effect. In the Sahara during these periods, there were larger lakes and/or more wetlands. These lakes were also linked by a more extensive river network and the rivers which are still there would have carried more water, particularly the Nile and the Niger. The shorelines of these lakes, and in one case, Lake Tchad, a sea, can be plotted using the contours of the land, and are further supported by the presence of rock art only above these levels, piles of fish bones and also the prevalence of fish hooks. Lake Tchad, sometimes referred to today in that prehistoric state as Megalake Chad, had an estimated area of 340 000 square kilometres and a depth of up to a hundred and sixty metres, which is about the size of the Caspian Sea. Other “megalakes” included the Megafezzan, Ahnet and, just barely cut off from the Mediterranean, the Chotta. This last has an interesting history as there was once a French plan to reflood the area by digging a canal from the sea to the basin. The Romans undertook an expedition in search of spices to the Tchad, where they encountered hippopotami. Also in these lakes were turtles, Nile perch and crocodiles. The presence of the rivers would also have eased movement into and out of the area. Just outside Afrika was the famed “Arabia Felix”, the south of the Arabian peninsula which is now uncontroversially desert but back then was perceived by the Romans as a fertile and lush environment where many spices originated. Although this is in the realm of “travellers’ tales”, there certainly would’ve been a time when the Arabian peninsula was like this.
The words for “hippo” in widely separated North Afrikan languages tend to be similar. In Aiki, spoken in Tchad, the word is bùngùr, in Songhoyboro Ciine, spoken in Niger, it’s bàŋà, and in the Nara language of Eritrea it’s àbà. That doesn’t sound that close to me, but there is also a theory which seeks to explain the distribution of the Afro-Asiatic languages in terms of the Sahara Pump. The current spread of these languages looks like this:
Hearing the word “Afro-Asiatic” may make them sound rather more obscure to Europeans than they in fact are. These are in fact what used to be called the Hamitic-Semitic-Kushitic language family, and includes the liturgical languages Ge`ez and Coptic as well as Hebrew, Arabic, Maltese and the Berber tongues, as well as Amharic, an important language of Ethiopia, the significant Hausa language of West Afrika, and Ancient Egyptian. There are 350 surviving Afro-Asiatic languages, spoken by a total of five hundred million people, Arabic being of course the most successful. Usually, when an attempt is made to reconstruct a parental language from a language family, such as Indo-European, it seems to date to some time in the Bronze Age. Not Afro-Asiatic though, I presume partly due to the fact that Ancient Egyptian is so, well, ancient, being over 5 500 years old. The other written language recorded at this time, Sumerian, and also the slightly more recent Elamite, are difficult or impossible to relate to any other known languages because they’re so ancient the chances are their relatives are all long-since extinct. By contrast, Proto-Afro-Asiatic may have been spoken between 18 000 and 12 000 years ago, which is pre-Neolithic, probably in Northeastern Afrika.
These languages occupy a special place in linguistics. Because of Biblical literalism and the importance of the Abrahamic faiths, Europeans used to believe that all languages were descended from Hebrew. After all, if you take Genesis literally, all of the speech quoted in it, including what Eve and Adam said, is in Hebrew, and if the Bible is literally true that implies that the first language was Hebrew. Also, the vast majority of modern scripts derives from Phœnician, even including the South and Southeast Asian ones, some exceptions being the Far Eastern, West Afrikan and Native American forms of writing, so these are the people who invented writing and their languages were some of the first to be written. Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic and Ge`ez are also liturgical, so are considered special within their faith communities.
The period during which Proto-Afro-Asiatic was spoken is pre-Holocene and during one of the more humid Saharan ages. There are a number of theories about where it originated, including one popular among Egyptologists that it was along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. This of course places it outside of Afrika already, and therefore presumes that it spread into the continent. It’s associated with the idea that languages spread with agriculture. The idea that it originated in the Horn of Afrika is based on the greater diversity found there, since more diverse languages tend to be found near their origins. An English example is the wide range of English accents found in this country in a relatively small area compared to the relative uniformity of North America and Australasia. The other two theories, which could involve the Sahara Pump Hypothesis, are that it originated in North Afrika and that it started in the southern Sahara and northern Sahel. DNA evidence among speakers of these languages suggests either the Horn of Afrika followed by an early spread into Asia followed by a return to the original region from Arabia, or the Middle East, the problem there being that the DNA in question arose by mutation after the spread had already happened. Also, linguistic and genetic histories can be completely different. One of the subgroups, though, is very high in both Tchad and Semitic language speakers, over ninety percent in fact, suggesting that both have an intermediate origin, perhaps over a very wide area of North Afrika, also known as the Sahara!
Hence I prefer to think of the origin of the Afro-Asiatic languages to be somewhere in the Green Sahara in the late Palæolithic. Whereas I don’t want to set too much store in the idea that ancient mythologies are inerrantly reliable sources, the Tanakh puts the origin of the whole human race in the Garden of Eden in Western Asia. If this is related to the idea of an Afro-Asiatic homeland it could mean that the Levantine theory is the correct one. However, if it isn’t, it kind of means that the Garden of Eden might in fact be the Sahara in a more humid phase, and that the stories told in Genesis relate to this area. Is it possible that the perception that land would become more hostile to growing crops because of what Christians think of as the Fall is actually due to the increasing harshness of the climate in that region. However, the clemency of the climate probably shouldn’t be overstressed since it still wasn’t exactly like France or some other “perfect” location. Placing the original land in North Afrika would also mean there was a movement of the people similar to the Exodus, but at a much earlier date which had nothing to do with the Ancient Egyptians.
The Afro-Asiatic languages as a group are largely uncontroversial except for the Omotic languages, which may not be related but simply have borrowed a lot of features from nearby languages which were genuinely Afro-Asiatic. These are written in the Ge`ez script like Amharic, or sometimes Latin, and are found in Ethiopia. They’re agglutinative – they inflect by adding separate morphemes to the stem – and also tonal, like most Afrikan languages spoken south of the Sahara. They’re the least like the other members of the family, and share vocabulary related to honey but not to bovids (“unto a land flowing with milk and honey” – “אֶל-אֶרֶץ זָבַת חָלָב וּדְבָשׁ”), suggesting that any split which may have occurred preceded pastoralism. If they are related, they’re closest to Cushitic, which is of course the group spoken in Kush, as mentioned in the Tanakh.
Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Maltese are all clearly closely related to each other, as anyone with a smattering of any of them can tell. Maltese is unusual as a Semitic language spoken in Europe today, and used to have a wider range as Siculo-Arabic, spoken in Sicily until the thirteenth Christian century. Uniquely for a Semitic language, it’s written using Latin script and has borrowed a lot of Italian vocabulary, but is still thoroughly Semitic in grammar. As well as being spoken all across the Maghreb and into the Middle East and being used as a liturgical and technical language over an even wider region, Arabic was, as I’m sure you know, spoken in Iberia and Arabic words have even made their way into French as a result. The importance of Arabic cannot be overestimated. Hebrew is of course the language of the Bible and Israel, and I’ve talked about it copiously elsewhere. Aramaic is still spoken as well, and is also used here and there in the Bible. It was the language of Jesus and its script was adopted all across Asia, even forming the basis of the cursive Mongolian script. It’s still spoken today and has an uninterrupted history of three millennia.
The Berber languages are spoken in the Sahara and have their own script, called Tamazight, which I learned a couple of years ago and used to write a long plan I mentioned which I didn’t want anyone else to read at the time. Berber language and culture has been adversely affected by Arab hegemony in the Maghreb because the countries involved pursued Arabisation on independence from France, not enabling the Berbers to have much influence. As can be seen from the map, whereas the Berber-speaking communities in the northeast of the continent are fairly scattered, they form a pretty continuous area over most of Mali, much of southern Algeria and some of Niger.
The Berber language Tawellemmet, the largest Tuareg language, is spoken in Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria, and overlaps in territory with the not very closely related Hausa. Hausa is important. It’s a Chadic language spoken by a total of 75 million people, often as a second language, and due to the rapid growth in the population of Nigeria this is likely to be a considerable underestimate. It’s used as an auxiliary language in the country. It’s spoken in northern Nigeria, southern Niger, Tchad, Ghana and Cameroun. Some of Hausa is tonal, some not, depending on the dialect. Nowadays Hausa is written in Latin script although it previously used Arabic, like many other Afrikan languages such as Kiswahili and even Afrikaans. It also has at least three other scripts. It has implosive as well as plosive consonants, pronounced with an influx of air rather than an egress from the lungs. There are a couple of dozen ways to pluralise nouns.
Related closely to Hausa are the other Chadic languages, spoken of course in Tchad but also Nigeria, the Central African Republic and Cameroun. There are about a gross of these, whose speakers are thought to be descended from the people who dwelt on the shores of Lake Tchad when it was a sea in the mid-Holocene seven thousand years ago. Although Hausa is by far the most widely spoken, another eight languages have at least 200 000 speakers, which is more than Gàidhlig by far. They’re all tonal and lack consonant clusters, and suffix agglutinatively. Ngas is the second most widely-spoken Chadic language, found on the Jos Plateau in Nigeria.
The southernmost Afro-Asiatic languages are the Kushitic ones spoken in the Rift Valley in Tanzania, including Iraqw which is currently expanding through absorbing nearby groups. Along this southern border of the family’s native area there are many Niger-Congo languages spoken too, which don’t mix with the Afro-Asiatic ones. For instance, in the Jos Plateau, there is a language completely surrounded by Ngas which is not under threat.
It would be a bit of an omission not to mention Ancient Egyptian. This is not entirely extinct because of being adopted by the Coptic church early in the Christian Era. By this point it was written in a modified Greek alphabet with a line over some letters for a certain vowel and the use of several demotic characters to represent sounds not in Greek. It must surely be the oldest surviving language in the world, being at least five and a half thousand years old. Very early on, it adopted signs standing for individual sounds in its hieroglyphics, although a wide range of different signs were used representing several consonants together, whole concepts, gender and status. The number of signs used actually increased as time went by and as technology changed the appearance of signs standing for tools also altered to make them more like the contemporary instruments. Although like most other Semitic languages Egyptian didn’t write vowels, some of them can be worked out from the fact that Coptic, using as it does the Greek alphabet, does. Hieroglyphics became hieratics when written on papyrus and were slightly more sketchy, and eventually the cursive demotic, which is basically a handwritten script like many others but retaining many of the conceptual features of hieroglyphics. Ancient Egyptian and Coptic have a lot in common with other Semitic and Afro-Asiatic languages.
Although you wouldn’t be able to tell from Coptic, Arabic or Hebrew, most Afro-Asiatic languages are tonal. Their scripts tend to relegate vowels to a secondary importance relative to consonants, which reflects the fact that they use a “root and pattern” system, where the consonants carry the basic meaning of the words and the vowels inflect it. This happens with English strong verbs and mutation plurals so it isn’t as foreign as might at first appear. They usually have two genders, feminine and masculine, which include human beings, and the genders of each noun tend to remain the same in most of the languages. They also usually distinguish gender in second person pronouns as well as third, though not in first. One of the mysterious things about them is that they share many grammatical features with today’s Celtic languages, which are completely unrelated, and nobody knows why.
I realise I’ve gone off on one regarding language here, but to finish I want to return to the basic thought that the Sahara is not always a desert. If human influence on the climate is sufficiently weak, at some time, probably about thirteen millennia from now, the Sahara will once again cease to be a desert for thousands of years, the megalakes and river network will return and vegetation will once again cover the region. During the Roman period, the focus and concept of Europe was in some ways subservient to the idea of a Mediterranean region which consisted of that sea and its hinterland. This also erodes the concept of Afrika as a separate set of regions, and removes the geographical barrier which White Europeans are so keen on as a way of separating the “Blacks” from the “Whites”. It’s a mere accident of time and geography that we happen to be living at this point where they are separate. Not only is it thought that darker-skinned people than currently inhabit the region lived all the way up to the Mediterranean, including Ancient Egypt to some extent, but the Western Hunter-Gatherer population was not fair-skinned and nor were Caucasians in general up until a few thousand years ago. The presence of hippos in the Thames and straight-tusked elephants in the Thames Valley brings home the point that Europe, Britain included, and Afrika are geographically continuous, and if they were connected back then, how much more connected are they in this age of globalism?
A Box Of Chocolates 