What unsolved mystery would you like to be explained in your lifetime?

About 20,000-6000 years bce there was abundant human populations around ancient freshwater lakes northern Sahara. During the late pleistocene period something changed the jet stream to sift south making the rains dip lower ranging though what is now the Congo and ending in Ethiopia. This whole process turned what what lust farmlands and grazing ranges for animals such as those which would eventually become our modern day cows and oxen, into the desertification of the norther part of Africa.

These lakes are believed to be the largest fresh water lakes known to have existed, and the Great Chad lake was thought to be magnitudes larger than Lake Michigan. Through the freshwater lake retreat and drying up, it forced human populations to travel east and north in the Saharan area and condensed them into more cooperative communities instead of widely spread agrarian groups. It is thought through the finds in that region, though they are scarce depict people’s building homes on the edge of the freshwater lakes and look to be evidence of early attempts at domestication through findings of pottery for gathering grains which would have grown in the area. There are also evident of Holocene era barbed bone points, fishhooks, Ounanian arrow-points showing there were well established communities all around these lakes.

The people’s would eventually thought to become the various people and tribes in the ancient egypt area. Evidence of their fascination with solar events and patterns of the stars can be found at sites like Nabta Playa. Roughly made somewhere between 9000-7500 BCE.

There is continuous research into those area to find out more of these people and what we can learn of their culture.

I am reciting what I remember from some of my anthropology studies on the subject about 12 years ago and refreshing some of that by google. It’s pretty fascinating though. I doubt everything I’ve said is 100% correct but there was major populations in the area during those time frames. I find it pretty unnerving though to see that they had to massively change their behaviors because of major climate shifts, abandon their homes and way of life, and move to a more central way of living along the Nile as their new way of gathering crops.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent