The

Sahara

56 WAYFARER
W hen most people imagine an archetypal
desert landscape—with its relentless sun,
rippling sand and hidden oases—they often
picture the Sahara. But 11,000 years ago,
what we know today as the world’s largest hot
desert would’ve been unrecognizable. The
now-dessicated northern strip of Africa was
once green and alive, pocked with lakes, rivers,
grasslands and even forests. So where did all that
water go?
Archaeologist David Wright has an idea:
Maybe humans and their goats tipped the
balance, kick-starting this dramatic ecological
transformation. In a new study in the journal
Frontiers in Earth Science, Wright set out to
argue that humans could be the answer to a
question that has plagued archaeologists and
paleoecologists for years.
The Sahara has long been subject to periodic
bouts of humidity and aridity. These fluctuations
are caused by slight wobbles in the tilt of the
Earth’s orbital axis, which in turn changes the
angle at which solar radiation penetrates the
atmosphere. At repeated intervals throughout
Earth’s history, there’s been more energy pouring
in from the sun during the West African monsoon
season, and during those times—known as
African Humid Periods—much more rain comes
down over north Africa.
With more rain, the region gets more greenery
and rivers and lakes. All this has been known for
decades. But between 8,000 and 4,500 years
ago, something strange happened: The transition
from humid to dry happened far more rapidly in
some areas than could be explained by the orbital
precession alone, resulting in the Sahara Desert as
we know it today. “Scientists usually call it ‘poor
parameterization’ of the data,” Wright said by
email. “Which is to say that we have no idea what
we’re missing here—but something’s wrong.”
As Wright pored the archaeological and
environmental data (mostly sediment cores and
pollen records, all dated to the same time period),
he noticed what seemed like a pattern. Wherever
the archaeological record showed the presence of
“pastoralists”—humans with their domesticated
animals—there was a corresponding change in the
types and variety of plants. It was as if, every time
humans and their goats and cattle hopscotched
across the grasslands, they had turned everything
to scrub and desert in their wake.
Wright thinks this is exactly what happened.
“By overgrazing the grasses, they were reducing
the amount of atmospheric moisture—plants
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give off moisture, which produces clouds—and
enhancing albedo,” Wright said. He suggests this
may have triggered the end of the humid period
more abruptly than can be explained by the orbital
changes. These nomadic humans also may have
used fire as a land management tool, which would
have exacerbated the speed at which the desert
took hold.
It’s important to note that the green Sahara
always would’ve turned back into a desert even
without humans doing anything—that’s just
how Earth’s orbit works, says geologist Jessica
Tierney, an associate professor of geoscience at
the University of Arizona. Moreover, according
to Tierney, we don’t necessarily need humans
to explain the abruptness of the transition from
green to desert.
Instead, the culprits might be regular old
vegetation feedbacks and changes in the amount
of dust. “At first you have this slow change in
the Earth’s orbit,” Tierney explains. “As that’s
happening, the West African monsoon is going to
get a little bit weaker. Slowly you’ll degrade the
landscape, switching from desert to vegetation.
And then at some point you pass the tipping point
where change accelerates.”

Tierney adds that it’s hard to know what

triggered the cascade in the system, because
everything is so closely intertwined. During the
last humid period, the Sahara was filled with
hunter-gatherers. As the orbit slowly changed
and less rain fell, humans would have needed
to domesticate animals, like cattle and goats,
for sustenance. “It could be the climate was
pushing people to herd cattle, or the overgrazing
practices accelerated denudation [of foliage],”
Tierney says.
Which came first? It’s hard to say with
evidence we have now. “The question is: How do
we test this hypothesis?” she says. “How do we
isolate the climatically driven changes from the
role of humans? It’s a bit of a chicken and an egg
problem.” Wright, too, cautions that right now we
have evidence only for correlation, not causation.
But Tierney is also intrigued by Wright’s
research, and agrees with him that much more
research needs to be done to answer these
questions.
“We need to drill down into the dried-up lake
beds that are scattered around the Sahara and
look at the pollen and seed data and then match
that to the archaeological datasets,” Wright

58 WAYFARER

said. “With enough correlations, we may be able
to more definitively develop a theory of why the
pace of climate change at the end of the AHP
doesn’t match orbital timescales and is irregular
across northern Africa.”
Tierney suggests researchers could use
mathematical models that compare the impact
hunter-gatherers would have on the environment
versus that of pastoralists herding animals. For
such models it would be necessary to have some
idea of how many people lived in the Sahara at the
time, but Tierney is sure there were more people
in the region than there are today, excepting
coastal urban areas.
While the shifts between a green Sahara and
a desert do constitute a type of climate change,
it’s important to understand that the mechanism
differs from what we think of as anthropogenic
(human-made) climate change today, which is
Despite being larger than the Continental U.S,
the Sahara is home to just 2 million people.
largely driven by rising levels of CO2 and other
greenhouse gases. Still, that doesn’t mean these
studies can’t help us understand the impact
humans are having on the environment now.
“It’s definitely important,” Tierney says.
“Understanding the way those feedback
(loops) work could improve our ability to
predict changes for vulnerable arid and
semi-arid regions.”
Wright sees an even broader message
in this type of study. “Humans don’t exist
in ecological vacuums,” he said. “We are
a keystone species and, as such, we make
massive impacts on the entire ecological
complexion of the Earth. Some of these
can be good for us, but some have really
threatened the long-term sustainability of
the Earth.”
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