9700–5500 BCE: (The Aquatic Civilization of Middle Africa — A Particularly Notable Subsistence Intensification in Africa Being the Rise and Extensive Spread …

9700–5500 BCE: (The Aquatic Civilization of Middle Africa — A Particularly Notable Subsistence Intensification in Africa Being the Rise and Extensive Spread of What J.E.G. Sutton Called the “Aquatic Civilization of Middle Africa” or the “Aqualithic,” the Early Holocene Spread of Tropical Rainfall Belts Northward Creating the Green Sahara with Rivers Flowing from the Tibesti and Hoggar Ranges and Creating Lake Fitri and an Enormous Lake Mega-Chad Over 600 Kilometers in Length, Early Nilo-Saharan Speakers Advancing Westward from the Nile Bringing an Intensive Foraging Economy Based on Large Fish and Hippopotamus): Developments leading toward agriculture were not the only subsistence intensifications of this age. A particularly notable example in Africa was the rise and extensive spread of what the archaeologist J.E.G. Sutton called the “Aquatic Civilization of Middle Africa” or the “Aqualithic.” The spread in the early Holocene of the tropical African rainfall belts, with summer rain, as far north as the middle of the Sahara — coupled with the countervailing spread of the Mediterranean winter rain regime southward to the same zone — created what has often been called the “green Sahara.” Rivers flowed out of the central Sahara mountain ranges of Tibesti and Hoggar, creating at least two great bodies of freshwater: Lake Fitri in today’s Libya and an enormous Lake Mega-Chad, well over 600 kilometers in length, stretching from modern-day Lake Chad in the south to the Tibesti Massif in the north. Early Nilo-Saharan speakers, advancing westward from the areas with an already aquatic economy along the Nile River, were the probable bearers of this new economy. Already in the ninth millennium BCE they would have been advancing along the new waterways and around Lake Mega-Chad, bringing with them their intensive, highly productive foraging economy based on the catching of large fish such as Nile perch and on the hunting of the hippopotamus. The Sahara that we know — the world’s largest hot desert, a void of sand and rock — is a recent invention, a product of the desiccation that began in the fourth millennium BCE. For thousands of years before that, it was a landscape of rivers and lakes, grasslands and wetlands, supporting human communities whose economies were as productive as any on earth. Lake Mega-Chad alone was larger than any of the Great Lakes of North America. And the people who exploited its resources — fishing for Nile perch, hunting hippopotamus, living along its shores — were Nilo-Saharan speakers carrying an economic tradition born along the Nile itself westward into a green and watered landscape that no longer exists. The Aquatic Civilization is one of the great lost chapters of human history, a continental-scale economic system that flourished for millennia and then vanished beneath the sands of an advancing desert, leaving behind only fish bones, harpoon points, and the linguistic evidence of the people who built it.