With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

scientists. It was the size of France, Spain, Germany, and the UK put
together. Today, the lake evaporates in the desert sun; but then, it
overflowed its inland basin and, at different times, drained south via Nigeria
into the Atlantic Ocean, or east down a vast wadi to the Nile.
The difference is that back then, the Sahara had assured rains. The whole
of North Africa was watered by a monsoon system rather like the one that
keeps much of Asia wet today. Rain-bearing winds penetrated deep into the
interior. From Senegal to the Horn of Africa, and from the shores of the
Mediterranean to the threshold of the central African rainforest, vast rivers
flowed for thousands of miles. Along their banks were swamps, forests, and
verdant bush.
Beneath the Algerian desert, archaeologists have found the sand- choked
remains of wadis that once drained some 600 miles from the Ahaggar
Mountains into the Mediterranean. And in southern Libya, a region so
waterless that even camel trains avoid it, archaeologists are finding the
bones of crocodiles and hippos, elephants and antelope. If there was a
vestige of true desert at the heart of North Africa, it was very much smaller
than the desert is today. And, of course, there were people—shepherds and
fishers and hunters—and some of the earliest known fields of grains like
sorghum and millet. Archaeologists digging in the sands of northern Chad,
currently the dustiest place on Earth, have found human settlements around
the shores of the ancient Lake Megachad. Paintings in caves deep in the
desert depict the lives of the inhabitants of the verdant Sahara of the
Holocene.
There are other remains from this time. Rocks beneath the Sahara contain
the largest underground reservoir of freshwater in the world. They were