The rock art of the green Sahara
Thousands of paintings across Algeria and Libya show swimmers, cattle herds and a wet Sahara.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 6 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 1 thousand years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Tassili n'Ajjer, the Acacus mountains and the Cave of Swimmers preserve one of the largest concentrations of prehistoric art anywhere — tens of thousands of images spanning millennia. The sequence changes with the climate: wild fauna including elephant, giraffe and hippopotamus first, then a long pastoral phase dominated by cattle herds, then horses, and finally camels once the desert has arrived. It is a climate record drawn by the people living through it.