The Lush Sahara

I've always been fascinated by the fact that the Earth is dynamic. It's always changing. There are the cyclic changes of the seasons, obviously, and the growing crops and gardens. And of recent there is the great melting of the ice shelfs in the Arctic, and how that is affecting not just the local area, but has ramifications for the entire planet.

Sometimes, however, these changes are so incremental that we can't see them. But they happen over geologic time nonetheless.

The Sahara used to be a lush land with lakes and plant life and people. That fact was brought to my attention again this morning as I read my morning paper. Anthropologists hunting for dinosaurs in the Sahara in Niger when they inadvertently stumbled upon a human cemetery dating about 10,000 years ago. This was long before the first pyramids were built in Egypt.

The picture in my paper had three skeletons--a female with 2 children, and the positioning of the bodies, with arms outstretched toward each other suggest that it's a mother and her 2 children. And pollen underneath the bodies indicates that they were buried on top of a bed of flowers. The children were wearing ornamental jewelry (a bracelet made of tusk material).

These people were part of a society of hunters and gatherers and fishermen who lived in this area. Others in the cemetery were quite tall--over 6 feet. This indicates they were healthy and well fed, and quite strong.

It's just interesting to try to imagine what life was like for these people in this lush area that has become desert. And it's a reminder that the Earth does change--sometimes quickly sometimes slowly. In this case, Earth's rotation was slightly altered, which changed the angle at which the Sahara region sees the sun. The result is what you see today.

Today however, we are not experiencing a rotation shift.

The scientific article for the find is here, and the article from my local paper is here.

Everybody In The Pool!!!

They found water on Mars!

Well, maybe the pool party is a bit premature. But in order to find any type of life with which we're in any way familiar, there has to be water, and it's there.

If there is or ever was life on the red planet, chances are it was/is microbial in nature.

Here's the story